The University of Texas men’s golf team counts a couple of South Africans among its best players, and the pair delivered a resounding and historic win for their country on Saturday in the 34th World Amateur Team Championship in Singapore.
In an event in which two of three scores from each team count over four rounds, Longhorns senior Christiaan Maas and sophomore Daniel Bennett provided all of the scoring for South Africa as it rolled to an eight-shot victory over Australia to capture its first Eisenhower Trophy and reach the podium for the first time in 40 years.
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Far out of the running was the U.S. team, made up of three recent Walker Cup winners who narrowly avoided becoming the first American squad to finish worse than 10th place in the biennial competition.
Maas, ranked sixth in the World Amateur Golf Rankings, was the class of the field, closing with a three-under-par 69 at Tanah Merah Country Club to complete a week in which he shot all four rounds in the 60s. With only three bogeys over the 72 holes, Maas’ 22 under individual total was 10 shots clear of the next-best score. Bennett scored even-par 72 to finish at seven under. Charl Barnard, the reigning champion of the South African Amateur, did not see any of his scores count.
With a 29-under total, South Africa beat Australia by eight shots, with England finishing another two strokes behind.
“I’m relieved, happy. It’s nice to see that my game can travel. It’s a long flight over here, different conditions,” said Maas, who lost a five-man playoff on Sept. 30 for the individual title of the Ben Hogan Collegiate Invitational at Colonial Country Club. “It’s a long week. I think building a lead, everybody thinks it’s all happy, but it also comes with a lot of pressure. … Being in a team event, it can quickly go the other way.”
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The U.S. team of high school senior Mason Howell and two Oklahoma State juniors, Preston Stout and Ethan Fang, faltered in the first round when each player shot 75, and though the Americans fought back with three straight team rounds of five under, they ultimately finished tied for 10th at nine-under 567.
It was Howell, winner of the U.S. Amateur over the summer at The Olympic Club, who fared the best with a four-day total of four-under 284. Fang and Stout each shot 288.
“It was a rough first day, obviously, and I’m just glad they hung in there and did their best and gave it their all the whole time,” U.S. coach Chris Zambri said. “We really wanted to come here and win this tournament. I know that South Africa played amazingly well, and that would have been a tall task no matter how well we played. … In the end, we didn’t have it this week like we needed to, to contend with a lot of these great players.”
The American men, who have won the team event 16 times, were hoping to follow the U.S. women, who captured the World Team Championship a week ago by beating Spain and the Republic of Korea in a tiebreaker. A victory by the men would have marked only the second time that men’s and women’s teams from the same country swept the championships. The U.S. was the first to do it in 1994.
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