There are two Masters taking place this year, the one you\u2019re watching, and the one you\u2019re playing in. Well. Maybe not you, exactly, unless you can count your handicap on two fingers, but the best player you know, that guy on the school run who used to play off scratch, that cousin who won the sports scholarship, or the uncle who everyone says could have made it back in the day. His name is Brandon Holtz and, if you haven\u2019t spotted him yet, he is, he says himself, \u201cthe old fat guy\u201d who has been playing with the two-time Masters champion Bubba Watson this week.<\/p>\n
Holtz is 39 and works full time as a real estate broker in Bloomington, Illinois. He plays as much golf as he can but, given that he has two kids, a five-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter, it isn\u2019t nearly as much as he\u2019d like. He is currently 3,262 in the world amateur golf rankings. Which of course means he is a hell of a good golfer. And also that he is ranked a full 3,160 places below his nearest competitor among the six amateurs in the field here. And that\u2019s before you even get to the other 10,000 or so professionals in the Official Golf<\/a> World Rankings, where he is currently unlisted.<\/p>\n Holtz qualified by winning the US Mid-Am, which is the route into the Masters for amateur players aged 25 and over. The last three players who came in that way, Evan Beck, Stewart Hagestad and Matthew McClean, were all ranked inside the world\u2019s top 100 at the time. It\u2019s hard to say for sure, the amateur records are patchy and only go back so far, but it would be odds-on that Holtz is the lowest\u2011ranked player ever to qualify for the Masters.<\/p>\n After the first round, Brandon Holtz said: \u2018This is a dream come true really.\u2019 Photograph: John Angelillo\/UPI\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n It\u2019s not his first time here, mind you. It\u2019s just that all the others were on the other side of the ropes. His dad, Jeff, who is caddying for him this week, won a patron\u2019s badge in the lottery in 2004, and they\u2019ve been back here pretty much every year since. They usually sit behind the 6th and bet beers on who of the players in front of them is going to end up closest to the pin. This year the patrons there are betting on him. Which is a hell of a thing.<\/p>\n Holtz didn\u2019t even play golf at college. He was on a basketball scholarship at Illinois State. He always had a good swing and was on his high school team, but he says himself that he never really bothered practising. He only took it up seriously after he had finished. He spent his early 20s on the mini tour trying to make it as a pro, but it cost him a lot more than he won. His best finish was second place in the Illinois Open, which earned him $14,000 (\u00a310,400). That was well over a decade ago now. In 2024 he paid $200 to the US Golf Association to have his amateur status reinstated.<\/p>\n