COMMENT: It’s tougher at the top

The action last weekend was an excellent demonstration of the fine line which exists between success and relative failure at the highest level.

At Marriott Worsley Park on the outskirts of Manchester the Challenge Tour staged one of its biggest events of the year.

In the field were former Ryder Cup stars Joakim Haegmann and Andrew Coltart as well as main tour winners such as Andrew Oldcorn.

The interest for those of us who have followed the amateur game closely in the past five years was in some of the other names in the field.

It was a veritable who’s who of elite amateur golf this Millennium. One-time Walker Cup stars were teeing it up in every other grouping while players who had claimed some of the big prizes in the unpaid ranks were well represented.

Further south, the European Tour pitched up at Celtic Manor and it was interesting to see Robert Dinwiddie produce another fine event as he laid another finger on the Rookie of the Year prize.

Dinwiddie enjoyed a fine college career and played with distinction on the 2005 Walker Cup side. He was no world beater in the making though.

Two weeks before, Richard Finch won his second – and biggest – event on the European Tour at the Irish Open. Again, the man from Hull was a strong player in amateur golf in the early years of this Millennium. But he was not deemed good enough to be on the 2003 Walker Cup side.

Instead Peter McEvoy, no mean judge of a player, opted for the likes of Irishmen Colm Moriarty and Noel Fox. And guess what they were doing last week? That’s right, playing on the Challenge Tour at Worsley.

Finch’s exclusion from the matches at Ganton in 2003 were controversial at the time (although it should be noted that GB&I won) but it just goes to show there are absolutely no guarantees in golf.

Two years later, NCG’s Ross Fisher became the third of a trio of young Englishmen to turn pro within weeks of each other and with the Walker Cup little more than a month away.

He has gone on to win on tour and is very much established among the top 50 in Europe, as you will have read in his column.

The other two? Sam Osborne, who hits the ball a country mile, has yet to make his mark even on the Challenge Tour.

And James Heath, hailed as the next great hope of English golf, was teeing it up at Worsley.

When he shot a scintillating final round to win the Lytham Trophy, there were not many, himself included I suspect, that predicted he would be thrashing about desperate to get on the main tour in 2009.

They may well be both late developers in pro terms but for now the glamorous, lucrative life they imagined as top young amateurs must seem frustratingly far away.

They, and Moriarty and Fox, would not be human if they did not look at Finch and Dinwiddie rather enviously. They will, however, be comforted by the knowledge that fortunes can change very quickly in golf.

This time next year, it is entirely possible it is Heath who has enjoyed a week in the spotlight at Celtic Manor.

By Chris Bertram