Playing With The Pros… The Amateur-Pro Team Competition
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Although the Volvo World Golf Challenge is already widely recognised as the biggest and most prestigious event for the club golfer, there is an additional element that is unique to Volvo and unique to this tournament. Each year, the best placed amateurs from the World Final get to tee it up with two top Professionals – stars of the European Tour – to form a 3-ball and contest the Amateur-Pro Team Competition. The format for this is that whilst the Pros are playing their own singles competition, their gross scores on each hole are merged with the net score of the amateur with the best two of the three used for the team. The benefit of this for the amateur is that he or she can have a bad hole and the score will not be used!
However, this is treated as a serious competition in its own right – to such an extent that Volvo offer the prize of a brand new V60 car to each of the two Pros in the winning team. This year, the competition took place on Friday, the second of the four days of the Volvo Golf Champions, an elite tournament open only to proven winners. The limited number of Pros who qualify to play in the event meant that this time there were 18 coveted places available to the amateurs. And when the 2-day World Final of the Volvo World Golf Challenge was completed the day before, the excellent mix of successful amateurs meant that no fewer than twelve countries were represented. Nationalities included Austria, Italy, Paraguay, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Sweden and the UK, reflecting the truly global nature of this prestigious and ever-growing event. An added excitement and nerve-tingling aspect was that the golf was being shown live on television all over the world to a potential audience of many millions.
Happily, the intense heat of the previous two days eased off a little so that the understandably nervous amateurs didn’t feel quite so overwhelmed. The friendly Pros also all did their bit by putting the players at their ease and making them feel it was a team effort.
Scoring was initially very close with most teams well under par, but around mid-afternoon one team managed to raise their game a level and ease themselves clear. Mark Vandenberghe from the UK, accompanied by fellow Englishman Lee Slattery and local hero Retief Goosen, managed to birdie the last and post a very impressive team score of 18 under par. The 7-handicapper from London was at the same time tired and elated, and described the golf course as “awesome… both the guys made me feel very comfortable, it was great, absolutely great.” Joking about the experience, former US Open champion Goosen said, “He hit some better shots out there than me!” And on winning a car, “How great is this? I didn’t even have to make a hole-in-one!” Third member of the team, Lee Slattery, shot the day’s best score, a sensational 8 under par 65. He felt that his amateur team mate had “…holed some great putts under pressure and hit some great shots as well. We all gelled well as a team.”
In second place, three shots behind was amateur Henning Frech from Austria who played with Charl Schwartzel, the reigning US Masters champion, and Simon Dyson from England. Two strokes further back were two more teams on 13 under par. The first featured amateur Guillermo Aquino from Paraguay with the home nation’s Hennie Otto and Rafael Jacquelin from France, and the other comprised scratch golfer Nasser Yaqoob from Bahrain with the start-of-day tournament leaders Nicholas Colsaerts from Belgium and emerging South African star, Brandon Grace.
For all eighteen amateur qualifiers from the World Final of the Volvo World Golf Challenge, this was truly a day to remember forever.
