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. Yeah, it's The Open. It's not going to be easy, is it?”
When Lamprecht signed off with his 66 he was leading by two. There was a chip-in at the 14th, otherwise there was nothing overly remarkable about it aside from the ability to keep putting himself something like 350 yards down the middle of each fairway. He gained strokes on the greens, with his approach play and, unsurprisingly, off the tee where he averaged 325 yards with a personal best of 363 yards.
This week he has Georgia Tech Assistant Coach Devin Stanton on the bag – Stanton was on the bag when Andy Ogletree won the US Amateur in 2019 – and Stanton has played a big role in not just helping on the course but overseeing his all-round game. At the start of last season Georgia Tech began measuring their players' shot data using Clippd and it was here that they realised that Lamprecht's approach play could elevate him to new levels.
“It got to a point where I realised that modern-day golf is becoming a wedge fest,” Lamprecht explained. “I felt with my length off the tee, I just wasn't good enough in that department of my game. Clippd showed me that I wasn’t capitalising on my good driving with my wedges and short irons. The scoring clubs have been a massive key to the success I've had in the last 20 months."
Another person to have played a big part in Lamprecht’s development is playing partner Oosthuizen whose academy he was part of since his early teens.
“That helped a lot to my score. I think having someone that I know very well and is a ginormous mentor that I've played previously with kind of helped me feel a little bit more at home and at ease. So yeah, it was kind of a nice draw. I thought they rigged it by some means, but no, I loved it.”
The pair have played practice rounds together but this is was the first time that Lamprecht had got the better of his mentor, in the end by eight shots.
“I don't think I've ever beaten him. I've played with him probably four or five times, nothing more than that. A couple practice rounds and pro events that I got into as a kid. I guess beating him was really nice. He had a bad round today but he was I cheering me on and that means a lot.”
Lamprecht planned to spend the rest of the day, other than catching his name at the top of the leaderboard, hitting a few balls and doing some chipping and putting. It's early days in the piece but he might not be too overawed as the week goes on.
"I think I'm very hard on myself and I think I earned my spot to be here. I think the way I played I earned to be on the top of the leaderboard, as of now. It's not a cocky thing to say. I just personally think I believe in myself, and I guess stepping on to the 1st tee box if you're a professional or a competitor, you should be believing that you should be the best standing there. I'm a little bit surprised, obviously, naturally, but I'm also -- I played good golf."
But the biggest takeaway and the likely headlines will be Lamprecht's ridiculous length. He got the driver out 11/14 times, otherwise he relied on an iron to get him 290 yards down the middle, and the bulk of those drives were hit with the ball teed way down and by reining things back a little.
“I stock it out driver about 320, 325 yards. I can get it to like 340 carry but I don't want to. Not in this weather. Not in links golf. It rolls far enough so I kind of keep it in front of me.”
