Almost a year to the day since he won the Amateur Championship at Royal Lytham & St Annes, Aldrich Potgieter has, without any fanfare, turned professional.
Potgieter, who was the second-youngest champion in the 127-year history of the Amateur Championship at 17, will play on a sponsor’s invitation in the Korn Ferry Tour’s Compliance Solutions Championship in Norman, Oklahoma which tees off on Thursday. He was also only the third South African to lift the trophy following Bobby Cole in 1966 – Cole was just 18 and the youngest-ever at the time – and Jovan Rebula four years earlier.
Now just 18, he has teed it up in two of the three major championships this year, as well as in last year’s Open Championship. He missed the cut at six-over at the Old Course last July, did the same at seven-under at Augusta National in the Masters in April, and made the cut in last week’s US Open, but a poor final round put him out of the running for leading amateur as he finished 64th on nine-over.
That performance in Los Angeles was his last big exemption from his win at Lytham, and he has decided to take his prodigious talent into the paid ranks.
It’s a low-key professional start for Potgieter, whose last major amateur achievement was winning the African Amateur Stroke Play Championship in a tournament shortened to two rounds by heavy rains at Leopard Creek.
The idea of easing himself into the paid ranks away from the harsh glare of the limelight of either the PGA Tour or the DP World Tour is a good one, and the example set by Casey Jarvis grinding it out on the Challenge Tour as he looks to step up a level, is clearly having some influence.
Potgieter, together with Jarvis, represents the newest of waves of good players emerging from the ranks of the GolfRSA National Squad, and, perhaps the most exciting of recent times.
