Broadly, this prompted two reactions. One was something very near to a snigger. The other was to ask what it said of young Australian golfers, with the stress on young. Let's turn the question around and ask, what does it say about golf? About sport?

Above all, it tells us that sporting victory does not have to belong to the fittest, slimmest, gym-est, huffing-est, puffing-est player out there. The way the sporting world has evolved, some even ask if golf is a sport, since it can be won by someone with, well, the profile of Peter Senior.

But it is a suffocatingly narrow definition of sport that draws the line at physicality. And sport has not always been the exclusive province of perfect physical specimens anyway, nor has it always had use-by dates. Julian Boros won the US PGA at 48, Jack Nicklaus the Masters at 46, and Tom Watson came within a stroke of winning the British Open at 59. Baseball always had room for the older, rounder man, and to judge from the belt-lines in the recent World Series still does.

Sir Jack Hobbs made more than half of his 197 first-class centuries after turning 40, and a Test century against Australia at 46. Brian Close faced up to the West Indies at their fearful best at 46, bare-headed. Bert Ironmonger made his Test DEBUT at 45. CK Nayudu, an Indian, played in the Ranji Shield when past 60.

Nor are we talking only about the historically more meditatively paced sports. Sir Stanley Matthews still was floating up and down Stoke City's wing at 50. Norwegian Olav Fosslien was playing in his country's third division at 60. In soccer especially, there is still a school that abhors the notion of bar-bells-beats-all. "Victory in soccer should never be the consequence of hard work," wrote Bosnian-born American author Aleksandar Hemon. "Rather, it should always be a kind of epiphany, an act of magic, unlearned and inexplicable."

If you can't hear the spluttering of the sports scientists, it's only because they haven't dared to poke their heads up over the parapets again yet.

George Blanda played pro football in the US until he was 48, and not so long ago; he retired in 1975. In AFL, the story of Vic Cumberland playing past 40 - he lasted to 43 - seemed like a fairytale, and then along came Dustin Fletcher. Even the scientists would have to concede that his longevity was an act of physiological magic, unlearned and inexplicable.

Take sport in its broadest definition, Fred Davis played in a semi-final of the world snooker championships at 64 and still commanded a place in the field at 70, and if no darts player has made it to 70, well, that might be more to do with sports medicine than sports science.

But overwhelmingly, sport has become a case of survival of the fittest, as much an aerobic pursuit as athletic, in which in order to draw, fade, curl, bend or slice you have first to be cut. Even in golf, the shaved-pencil-slim had come to prevail.

Then along comes Senior and his moment of unlearned and inexplicable magic, opening up for us a new-old idea, that the sport in sport is not necessarily or indeed at all simply about the hardest-working, fittest, meanest or rudest, which would imply that as long as we all trained as hard as Robert Harvey and were as conditioned as Craig Alexander and as driven as Novak Djokovic and had a mouth like David Warner, we would all be world-beaters, which is nonsense.

Senior's double blessing is that his sport has a competition for men of a certain age, which means he can have his cake at eat it, too. Vitamin-rich and cholesterol-free, of course.

Incidentally, there is one thing better than than being 56, and that is being not quite 56, yet.