Supposedly in 2014 only Tom Watson and Darren Clarke hit drivers off the 3rd tee. The perceived wisdom is that you play a long iron to the corner of the dogleg, stay short of the internal out of bounds, smash a long iron to the left half of the green and walk off with a par or bogey.
Or, alternatively if you’re 22 with an average ball speed of 192mph, you get your driver out and don’t even see the white stakes. Amateur champion Christo Lamprecht left himself 108 yards in, he was so long that he ran out of room and had to take a drop from the Mastercard hospitality suite, and pitched and putted for a birdie. Priceless.
At the previous hole he had got within 91 yards of the 458-yard 2nd. At the 4th, a par 4 of 354 yards, the South African found a greenside bunker with his tee shot and, with one enormous leg outside the sand, had to play his second shot backwards before getting up and down for a par.
At the next he left his playing partners, Joost Luiten and his mentor Louis Oosthuizen 50 yards in his slipstream, as he made mincemeat of the par 5.
“I don’t go that far on my holidays,” quipped one fan which failed to bring about as much laughter as he had seemed to anticipate.
At 6”8 there’s not much of the ordinary about the 22-year-old. You could fit a small family in the space between his size 13 feet and the ball. The grip is strong, the backswing has shades of JB Holmes and the ball goes forever. One seasoned campaigner following the group commented that he had never seen anything like it in working at The Open for 25 years.
He won The Amateur at Hillside having only just qualified from the strokeplay stages by taking an aggressive approach to the course and, this time around, there was a sound mix of taking the trouble out of play with the driver or, at times, smashing a long iron to where his playing partners’ drivers were finishing up.
“At Hillside a lot of the bunkers were about 300 yards so I could comfortably carry a lot of them and that gave me a huge advantage. Out here the bunkers are placed a lot better. There’s some holes obviously I’ve been taking advantage. But yeah, it’s placed a lot better a little more around here….
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