The pair were grateful to be among the early starters at Doha Golf Club, getting in with seven-under rounds of 65 before first a sandstorm and then the threat of lightning forced play to be suspended.

The rain continues to pour #CBQMasters pic.twitter.com/zIO8kSCI2f

— DP World Tour (@DPWorldTour) October 26, 2023

Scenes you don’t expect to see when in Qatar…

?: @AntoineRozner #CBQMasters pic.twitter.com/P0qcc4HyFk

— DP World Tour (@DPWorldTour) October 26, 2023

Jamieson’s fellow Scots Stephen Gallacher, Robert MacIntyre and defending champion Ewen Ferguson completed rounds of 66 to share second place with Spain’s Santiago Tarrío.

The leaders both started on the back nine and Jamieson, playing in one of the first groups out at 6am local time, hit the front immediately with a birdie at his first hole, the 10th, and added another three holes later.

He fired four in five holes from the 17th and rounded off a bogey-free day with a seventh birdie at the fifth.

He said: “Delighted with that start. It was pretty solid tee to green and I managed to hole some putts today, which has probably let me down in the last few weeks — certainly been hitting the ball well enough to do better than I have done — but today was a different story.

“It was lovely (being out first). The only problem is it is so humid but you obviously get less wind as you always know you are going to get wind here in the afternoon and the course is a little softer as well so, thankfully, I was able to take advantage of that.”

Hillier was slower to hit his stride but opened with six pars before bursting into life with birdies at the 16th and 18th, an eagle at the par-five first and another birdie at the second.

Further gains at the seventh and ninth took him alongside Jamieson and the New Zealander, speaking before the disruption from the weather, said: “It’ll be interesting to see how it goes this afternoon but I’ll be at the hotel kicking up my feet, so happy days.

“You have to battle with the heat this week. A little bit of wind out there made it bearable. I just didn’t do much wrong, had a good stretch through the middle that put me in a good position and kept my foot down from there.”

Tarrío finished off his own bogey-free round in style with an approach to two feet at the ninth to set up his sixth birdie.

The Spaniard is secure in the top 116 of the Race to Dubai Rankings in partnership with Rolex, ensuring his presence on tour for another year.

But he admitted: “I never keep calm with myself. Never. Even with a card safe for next year. My problem is in my head, there’s a lot of wind inside there, never mind the golf course.

“I didn’t play my best golf this year, but I’m happy to stay one year more here with the big guys.”

Gallacher, the only one of the leading sextet to start on the front nine, birdied three of the first four holes and turned in 31 before adding a sixth and final birdie at the 16th.

MacIntyre finished with back-to-back birdies, helped by an approach to six feet at the ninth, while Ferguson turned in 34 before making his move with a hat-trick of birdies from the first.

Finnish pair Kalle Samooja and Sami Välimäki, Sean Crocker, Thriston Lawrence, Andy Sullivan, Pablo Larrazábal and Joshua Grenville-Wood shared seventh place on five-under.

Among those still to complete their rounds, Spain’s Alvaro Quiros and England’s Jordan Smith were highest on the leaderboard at three-under through nine holes.

Scott Jamieson. DP World Tour

The post Qatar Masters: Jamieson and Hillier lead on stormy first day in Doha appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By John Huggan
ABU DHABI — He’s not going away. Not yet anyway. For three days now, well-known names have clustered around the top of the leader board in the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship. And that is the case with 18 holes to play. Shane Lowry, Viktor Hovland, Ian Poulter and Adam Scott are all within five shots of first place after 54 holes on the testing 7,425-yard Yas Links layout. But they have all been looking up at the same man at the end of each round: Scott Jamieson.

Making two birdies in his last four holes for four-under 68, the 38-year-old Scot is on 11-under 205 so far. Lowry and former NCAA champion Thomas Pieters sit second, one shot back. But as many as 12 others will harbor varying degrees of hope come the final round. Hovland is alongside Shubhankar Sharma of India, two shots further away from the leader.

Jamieson, who attended Augusta State and makes his home in Florida, has had a solid but relatively unspectacular career. In 299 previous starts on the DP World Tour, he has but one victory, at the 2012 Nelson Mandela Championship. Last year, he pulled up in 108th place on the Race to Dubai. Right now he is 336th on the World Ranking. En route, he has accumulated earnings of €5,745,592, a total that would be boosted by $1,330,000 should he make it four consecutive days in the lead at the end of Sunday’s play.

That isn’t as unlikely as it might seem. In each of his last three visits to the largest of the United Arab Emirates, Jamieson has posted top-20 finishes. The next step is a big one though. And identifying the final ingredient to make that leap is clearly something he is aware of.

“It’s a great question,” Jamieson said. “And if I knew the answer I maybe would have won more often. All I can do is play whatever shot is in front of me. I’m going to use all those clichés, stay in the moment and just try and hit the best shot I can. It would be a massive win for me though, a game changer to win a tournament of this stature. But there are some great champions chasing me, and there’s an awful long way to go.”

Should Jamieson falter, there will be no shortage of candidates to claim the distinctive trophy. Perhaps the most dangerous is Lowry. Despite playing only nine holes of golf in “six or seven weeks” before and after Christmas and with only a week of practice in Florida behind him, the 2019 Open champion was making understandably positive noises after shooting a bogey-free 67. He even found time to laugh at his folly on the 18th, when he aimed at the wrong advertising sign behind the green with his second shot and nearly lost it in a penalty area.

“I’m driving the ball well and in play,” said the Irishman. “And my iron play has been decent. I like the look of the course. I like the way it fits my eye. The scoring is in the area that I like best. If you shoot 69 out there you’ve had a pretty good day. There are plenty of weeks on the PGA Tour that are just shoot-outs. But this is a week for patience.

“You need to know where you’re going out there,” Lowry continued. “You need to know where the misses are. That’s key on a course like this. You have to know where you are going to have a chance to recover. You have to be clever about how you play. You get better at that as you get older and play around the world on different courses. You have to wait for your run of birdies. And I’ve done that very well this week. So far at least, this has been a nice way to start the year for me.”

Further down the leader board, Rory McIlroy’s 67 matched that of Lowry, Pieters, Shubhankar, Bernd Wiesberger and Romain Langasque for best of the day. But the Northern Irishman remains well out of contention. Hs sits T-28 on two-under par, nine shots off the pace.

The post Who is Scott Jamieson and how is he fending off so many top players in Abu Dhabi? appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By John Huggan
ABU DHABI — Viktor Hovland didn’t shoot the lowest score on Day 1 of the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship. That honour goes to the nine-under-par 63 shot by Scotland’s Scott Jamieson over the 7,425-yard Yas Links course. But Hovland can lay legitimate claim to having played the best round of the day. So it is that the Norwegian’s 64 in the much windier afternoon conditions (Jamieson played early) is the pick of the 132-player bunch.

“It was pretty windy out there,” Hovland said. “When I woke up, I did have a look at the forecast. At that stage it was almost calm. But this afternoon it must have been blowing at least 12 mph. And there were some tricky pin positions. You definitely had to miss it in the right spots.”

That last bit requires some clarification. To say the putting surfaces on the Kyle Phillips-designed layout are undulating is like pointing out how busy Manhattan can be in rush hour. So it is that hitting approach shots into the correct parts of the generally sizable greens is a big key to scoring well. Miss those parts and three-putts become almost the norm.

Not surprisingly, Hovland subscribed to that thesis in the immediate aftermath of a round that featured nine birdies and just one dropped shot, coming at the 484-yard par-4 12th. Indeed, he went even further in making his point.

“Where they put the pins actually made distance control more important than direction,” said Hovland, No. 7 in the World Ranking. “On many greens there was room either side of the flags. But if you went past or came up short it wasn’t very good at all. From those positions, you would have some funky putts. Or have to chip over big slopes. So my iron game had to be really sharp.”

Still, for all the excellence towards the top of the leader board—as many as 37 players broke 70—one round stood out. One day after bemoaning just about every aspect of his game and life, Tyrrell Hatton nipped around the premises in a bogey-free 66 shots. And did he smile afterwards? He did. But only briefly when he was asked for his thoughts on a more than blustery weather forecast for the second day.

Defending champion @TyrrellHatton off to a strong start ?#ADGolfChamps | #RolexSeries pic.twitter.com/uYrVxGfbIY

— DP World Tour (@DPWorldTour) January 20, 2022

“Hopefully it’s so windy we get a day off,” he said. “That would be nice.”

“I’m quite surprised how I scored today,” he continued. “It didn’t actually feel like I played that well. You don’t really know where your game is at until you play in tournament golf. Obviously, if you’ve got low expectations in the middle of the season, that’s probably not a good thing. But starting out, I don’t see it as a negative. Anyway, although I don’t feel like I played like that great, I did score really well. ”

That he did. Six shots better than playing partner Rory McIlroy, in fact. The Northern Irishman could do no better than a even-par 72 after dropping shots on three of his last four holes.

The post The Abu Dhabi leaderboard may say otherwise but Viktor Hovland opened with the round of the day appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

Scott Jamieson jarred his tee shot on his second hole of the Italian Open, but instead of jubilation, there was, well, not much. A stoic Jamieson walked off the tee box, looking down to brush something off the tee box before methodically handing his club to his caddie. Have a look:

? HOLE-IN-ONE! ?@scottjamieson54 on his second hole of the day.#ItalianOpen pic.twitter.com/XA8zMsOWj4

— The European Tour (@EuropeanTour) October 22, 2020

Of course, while many on social media got a kick out of the Scottish pro’s dull demeanour, there was a simple explanation for what happened. Jamieson hadn’t seen the ball go in the hole and with no fans due to COVID-19, he was unaware of the ace.

@scottjamieson54 pic.twitter.com/1u6njlW5Qx

— The European Tour (@EuropeanTour) October 22, 2020

Here’s a happier-looking Jamieson as he walked off the green after plucking his golf ball from the cup:

For those of you who thought I wasn’t excited about my hole-in-one today ?#ItalianOpen pic.twitter.com/EqBV0SthzT

— Scott Jamieson (@scottjamieson54) October 22, 2020

But Jamieson saved his best reaction for last. When asked about the ace during a post-round interview following an opening 68 that puts him eight shots behind leader Laurie Canter’s brilliant 60, the 36-year-old played it too cool for school. Before cracking a big smile to indicate he was kidding. Check it out:

Well played, Scott. Hopefully you’re still smiling after settling your bar tab later.

The post No one has ever played a hole-in-one cooler than this European Tour pro appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.