Pongsapak Laopakdee, a 21-year-old Thai golfer better known as \u201cFifa\u201d, is ready for a historic start Thursday at the 90th Masters.<\/p>\n
Fifa, a student at Arizona State University, will become the first Thai amateur to compete at Augusta National when he tees off in the opening round at the famed course.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a huge honour, that\u2019s for sure, to be the first Thai amateur to play in the Masters. It\u2019s always nice to know that you\u2019re playing for something that\u2019s bigger than yourself,\u201d he said on Monday.<\/p>\n
\u201cThai fans have been very nice to me. It\u2019s nice to see how much they care and how much they support me and have my back.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fifa won last October\u2019s Asia-Pacific Amateur in Dubai to claim a spot in this week\u2019s Masters field, making birdies on the last two holes of regulation play and all three play-off holes to earn his trip to Augusta.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was just singing songs down the fairway in the play-off and trying to stay in the present, not think too much about what\u2019s going on around me, just stay composed,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pongsapak Laopakdee, a 21-year-old Thai golfer better known as \u201cFifa\u201d, is ready for a historic start Thursday at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":379138,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[17078,181552,111760,181551,181550,245,1120,19712,85,46,143901,78904,1326,181553,105,70852,18724,1032],"class_list":{"0":"post-379137","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-arizona-state-university","9":"tag-asia-pacific-amateur","10":"tag-augusta","11":"tag-augusta-national","12":"tag-bryson","13":"tag-canada","14":"tag-dubai","15":"tag-fifa","16":"tag-il","17":"tag-israel","18":"tag-jon-rahm","19":"tag-masters","20":"tag-mexico","21":"tag-pongsapak-laopakdee","22":"tag-sports","23":"tag-thai","24":"tag-tiger","25":"tag-united-states"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379137\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}