Every day is a school day, it seems ...
even here at the Amateur Championship. It's not often the work of the pioneering mathematician, Leonhard Euler, crops up at a golf tournament but then the Scottish scribblers are an erudite crew and can occasionally be heard blethering away about infinitesimal calculus and graph theory while waiting on the media centre kettle to boil. "I'd been doing my final university projects on Euler's theorem but I'm not going to explain it to you ... a lot of it was to do with circles," said Kilmarnock's applied mathematics graduate, Jack McDonald. "Why of course it is," we chorused, before asking him what he thought about coprime positive integers.
McDonald proved to be a dab hand at working out a formula for getting a little dimpled ball into small circular hole at Carnoustie yesterday as he mounted his title assault with a dominant 6 and 5 victory over Fred Wedel of Texas in the opening matchplay round. Wedel had reached the semi-finals of the US Amateur Championship last year but he never got to grips with the rigours of Carnoustie on a day when a constant, boisterous wind added a new layer of menace to the Angus links. "I don't think he was used to this," said McDonald, who is well versed in the various nuances of links golf. Now that all that maths stuff is out of the way, McDonald can focus on this numbers game and having reached the last-four of the Amateur Championship at Royal Troon in 2012, the 22-year-old is eyeing another purposeful campaign this week. "That run in 2012 gave me the belief that I could compete at this level and hopefully I can do something similar here," added the Ayrshireman.
Come the end of the first session of head-to-head encounters, there were five of the eight Scottish qualifiers still standing. The day hadn't started too well for the home contingent when Craig Howie, the No 1 seed following the 36-hole strokeplay phase, lost 2&1 to Italy's Michele Cea. It was the 17th time, since qualifying was introduced in 1983, that the top seed had fallen at the first hurdle. The phrase 'poisoned chalice' always get trotted out at this stage of an Amateur Championship.
Grant Forrest, the former Scottish Amateur champion who is based at the University of San Diego, continued to acclimatise to competition back on home soil with a 6 and 4 win over another past Scottish champion, Zander Culverwell. "I'm getting back into this type of golf and it's good to use the imagination a bit," said Forrest, who gained his revenge on Culverwell having lost to him in the semi-finals of the 2013 Scottish championship. Forrest's birdie on the seventh illustrated the type of shot that will prove a useful weapon in the armoury. "I had 180 yards and I played a knock-down 4-iron which rolled to four-feet," added Forrest, who will now face a stiff test against Gisli Sveinbergsson, the winner of the Duke of York Young Champions at Royal Aberdeen last season and one of three impressive Icelandic players who progressed to the last 32.
Kirkhill's Craig Ross, feeling the benefits of "about 15 rounds at Carnoustie" in recent months, produced a telling burst of three successive birdies at 10, 11 and 12 en route to a spirited 2 and 1 victory over Cameron Davis of Australia while Thornhill's Greig Marchbank and Glencruitten left-hander Robert MacIntyre both eased into the next round.
Given the pendulous, unpredictable nature of the matchplay format there are always the so-called shocks and Norway's Vetle Maroy, ranked world No 565, claimed a notable scalp with a one hole win over Sweden's highly-rated Marcus Kinhult, the world No 3. Kinhult won the Lytham Trophy by eight shots last month and was the joint halfway leader in the European Tour's Nordea Masters recently but that pedigree counts for little in the man-to-man jousts. Three down with four to play, the battling Maroy birdied the 15th to reduce the leeway before capitalising on Kinhult's wretched run of three straight bogeys over Carnoustie's formidable closing stretch to win on the last green.
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