The Amateur Championship

So my whole team came over.

played in the British Amateur at North Berwick.

It was such an amazing experience.

And we were able to come to my home.

We went to Anne Walker's family home.

We had such a brilliant week.

And the team there, I remember, we all played in the British Amateur.

My brother was caddying for me.

I must get this right this time.

Stuart Wilson, who'd won the Amateur Championship in 2004, which qualified him for the Masters, which obviously would've been the, the biggest thing in his career at that point.

And so I went to go and find him.

I had Andrew Cotter alongside me, who was very helpful because he was able to point him out, because obviously they're not wearing name badges, and I wouldn't necessarily recognize Stuart Wilson.

I've got to know Sean a little bit just through the last year or so, and Sean is just so low-key about how good he is as a golfer.

Like, you know, we talked about in our pub with him, you know, he beat John Rahm back in the British Amateur in his amateur days, you know, has played some seriously high-level golf, and he's just so nonchalant, and he's obviously doing his stuff with Yes Life, and they've done their app and stuff like that.

So I think that the competitive stuff's maybe taken a little bit of a backseat over the last year for him, but... you know great to see him you know he was really in with a sniff he was only what a couple of shots back going into what would have been the final round uh like we mentioned we'll never know how that would have eventuated but i guess that's kind of the positives we were surprised you know josh geary in his kind of you know a course that he knows like the back of his hand we thought maybe a little bit of uh the off season maybe he might have come out a little bit refreshed but just sort of struggled to get things going what was your perspective watching josh out there

Yeah, I think that's certainly a fair assessment.

I think that was it.

It was like a breach of amateur status to go to the US, so we, we always tended to go to the British Amateur and play all the events there.

And when you've played a lot in the UK, the use of out of bounds is just part of the-

Yeah

Yep.

But the sooner the Amateur Championship is back to match play, the better for everybody.

And, and your idea of putting it on, you know, your top five last week, putting it at match-play-friendly venues that would look amazing on the TV, not just to us, but to a nation of golfers and maybe even, you know, it might be picked up on the Golf Channel at 11:30 at night time over there at PM-

Mm

Mm-hmm.

And then you got Jasper Stubbs, uh, just above the U in Jupiter.

Uh, he won, of course, the, uh, Asia Pacific Amateur Championship and played in Augusta and played at the, uh, the Open Championship.

Jack Wilson, who did a great job MC-ing the next day.

So most of my, most of my kind of early amateur golf overseas was, was the UK.

So I'd go and play the St. Andrews Links Trophy, British Amateur, um, bunch of events.

I did that maybe three or four years in a row.

And that was where, you're right, Charlie, that, um, [smacks lips] comment that I've said before, 'cause it was kind of pre-internet.

But then when I'd sort of played nicely in, you know, in early sort of March, April time, it was, it was kind of like, okay, like I'm looking at the rankings and, you know, I'm, I got a sniff at this.

And then when I came back and, you know, played, I played good at the Amateur Championship, and Dean was there, and I s- and I spoke to him, and that's when it sort of sink- sunk in, like, okay, like I really want this pretty bad.

Um, and then it was, it was lucky for me that, you know, I continued to play pretty good on all those links golf courses.

And I was, I was actually planning on going back and playing the Western Amateur before the US Am, and Dean was... put a massive emphasis on playing the South of Ireland.