Man on the Move

Lewine Mair profiles South Africa’s player of the moment - Branden Grace, whose consistent play has seen him rise to comfortably inside the top-50 on the Official World Golf Ranking

Grace in action during the 2012 Volvo China Open

He had another go - six shots to be precise. The ball went forever, the smile never left his face and the club duly went in the bag. “It was one of those moments where you feel, ‘That’s the club’ straightaway,” he recalled during the photo-shoot in Dubai which followed his twin wins in the Alfred Dunhill Championship at Leopard’s Creek and the recent Commercial Bank Qatar Masters.

Driver and owner shared the limelight when it came at the driveable par-4 16th in Qatar. Needing to shake off Scotland’s Marc Warren, Grace shaped the ball to six feet to pave the way for his championship-winning eagle. “It wasn’t,” he says, feelingly, “my favourite tee shot with the wind coming off the left but I hit it high and it came down nice and softly.

It was Nick Dye, the European Tour’s resident broadcaster, who was the first to remind Grace that he had matched what he had done in 2012 in being able to boast of two wins when it was still only January. Would he do as he had done two years previously and go on to win two more? (They were the Volvo China Open and the aforementioned Dunhill Links.)

Grace liked the sound of that and you had to wonder if, even then, he was harbouring thoughts of The Open being in the mix.

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