There are many ways to prepare for an Open Championship. Days can be spent on reconnaissance missions over the links as you mull over club selection from the tees and plot each hump, hollow and possible pin position with the intense attention to detail that would get you a job at the Ordnance Survey.
But what happens when all that meticulous planning goes flying out the window? Well, you just arrive for your tee-time in a helicopter a couple of hours before you’re supposed to head off in round one, pick up a set of hastily cobbled together spare clubs and get cracking. Sounds simple. Not quite.
The fankle poor Jhonattan Vegas had to endure in the fraught build up to his second Open appearance was the kind of breathless palaver that should have been accompanied with an oxygen mask.
Read more: The Open: Tiger effect has knock on for Russell Knox
In the end, a five-over 76 over the rigorous Carnoustie links was a pretty admirable effort from the Venezuelan given the events leading up to the triple PGA Tour winner’s mad dash to Angus.
If you were in the vicinity of Glasgow airport yesterday and spotted a chopper taking off, there’s a good chance Vegas was on it. He probably could have powered the birling rotors with his own gasps, huffs and puffs. It’s probably best to let him explain the situation.
“It’s been like a horror movie happening for the past week,” he said. “If someone had tried to do it on purpose, you couldn’t manage it.
“Last Thursday, I was supposed to travel to Scotland, arrive Friday and have a few days to adjust. I looked at my visa and confused the dates. At the end of the day, it wasn’t that big a deal as I could get a visa in 24 hours, so I applied Thursday morning and was supposed to get it Friday.
“For some weird reason, the people at the Consulate in New York didn’t respond to the application. Then it was the weekend and they contacted me on Monday morning saying I had applied for the wrong visa.
“We fixed it on Monday and it was supposed to be in Houston on Tuesday, which meant I could get a flight and still be here on Wednesday. That would give me a day to see the course.
“But that didn’t happen because UPS (the delivery service) shut down for the day. The visa didn’t leave New York.
“I waited in a car for seven hours outside the Consulate waiting for it to show up. It didn’t. I got it on Wednesday morning, so then got a flight from Houston to Scotland via Toronto and slept for maybe two hours on the flight.
“My agents got me a helicopter ride from Glasgow to here, so it was planned up for me to be here two hours before tee-time.”
Read more: The Open: Tiger effect has knock on for Russell Knox
It looked like things would work out in the end. But there was another twist in the tale for the bleary-eyed Vegas.
“My clubs didn’t show up, the only bag of mine that didn’t,” he added. “I called my caddy and said, ‘please go and scramble some clubs’.
“Luckily, the equipment vans were still here. If it was the PGA Tour, they would have been gone and I’d have been playing with some member’s clubs. He scrambled some that were a different brand from mine. I hit 20 balls then went out and gave it a try.
The lure of the Open Championship meant Vegas wasn’t going to give up despite everything being stacked against him. “As long as I had a shot at making it, I was going to try,” he said.
“Ask anyone in the world if they would play in the Open showing up two hours beforehand, they would take it. But I really thought someone was playing a joke on me. Everyone was having a laugh. I took it the same way. If I hadn’t, I’d have broken some clubs.”
At least they wouldn’t have been his own ones.
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