Some golf courses are cathedrals, and some are the parish hall down the street where the choir first learned to sing. Sandy Golf Links in Cheltenham belongs to the second kind, though it sits in a neighborhood of cathedrals, with Royal Melbourne and Victoria Golf Club right next door. For decades this publicly owned course has been a port of entry for young Melbourne golfers, the place where many of them first learned the game and came away carrying the Sandbelt in their bones. It began in 1946, when the local council bought the land and asked Vern Morcom to lay out nine holes. Morcom was the long-serving superintendent at Kingston Heath and the son of Mick Morcom, who had been the founding superintendent at Royal Melbourne. Father and son were prolific builders and architects, and their influence on the Australian game is hard to overstate. Under the name Sandringham Golf Club, the course grew to 12 holes in 1951 and to a full 18 in 1955. It was Sandbelt lineage open to the public. Time is not kind to architecture. Over the decades Morcom's details faded, and tea trees crept in, gnarled and crowding, until the playing corridors felt hemmed in. Still, the course kept doing its real work. Geoff Ogilvy reckons that 80 of his first 100 rounds were played here, and his future partners Mike Cocking and Ashley Mead were regulars in their early years too. A nursery does not have to be pristine to raise fine golfers, but it helps to remember what it was meant to be. In the late 2010s, the facility received a $19-million makeover funded by Golf Australia and the Victorian government. The land became home to the Australian Golf Centre, with a state-of-the-art practice area and the headquarters of Golf Australia, the PGA of Australia, Golf Victoria and the National High Performance Centre. As part of that project, the three old regulars came back as OCM Golf to redesign Morcom's course, fitting 18 holes into a smaller footprint. Sandy Golf Links now plays to par 65 over 5,319 yards. Short, yes, but there is nothing slight about it. The ground is firm, the bunkers spill outward in irregular, amoeba-like shapes, and the holes keep asking whether you want to take the bold line or the safe one. The turf is strikingly similar to the neighbor's: Bermudagrass fairways, bentgrass greens of the Sutton's Mix, fescue around the edges. That is no accident. Since the redesign, Royal Melbourne's own crew has looked after Sandy. "It's like a small version of the bigger Sandbelt courses," Ogilvy said. Cocking has said there are no replicas, only a few loose homages, and you feel them as echoes rather than quotations. A double green holds the flags for the fifth and the 10th, bearing some likeness to the shared eighth and 16th green at Kingston Heath. The seventh green takes after the contouring of the fallaway third at Royal Melbourne West. The uphill par-3 16th borrows from both the lost seventh at Royal Melbourne West and the famous 15th at Kingston Heath, so something of a hole that vanished lives on here. That is the quiet romance of the place. The men who learned the game here returned to give it back its birthright, and the result is an authentic taste of Sandbelt golf at an affordable rate. The great courses next door are the Sandbelt's crown. Sandy Golf Links is its doorway, and the door is open.