Overseas guests make hay on alien ground
Sport needs a little bit of romance to keep it interesting and the British Open and Davis Cup, golden oldies both, produced some lovely stories last week. The final qualifying of the British Open, with 480 players hunting just 44 spots, is as tough as they come and once again there were several tales of the unexpected. Taiwan's Yeh Wei-tze featured in one of them.
Yeh has been playing in Britain and Ireland for six months thanks to the exemption he received by winning the Malaysian Open in February. While his game has come on by leaps and bounds his English is still rudimentary at best, something which has caused him travel problems galore. So it was that Yeh and his Taiwanese girlfriend, who doubles as his caddy, turned up at a bus station last Friday after he missed the cut in the tournament at Loch Lomond.
He explained in halting English that he wanted to go to St Andrews where he was playing golf. But the message did not come across that well. For one reason or another he was told that he could not get a bus until Saturday - 'eh laddie, you cannae go today' - so he spent another day on the bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.
By the time he made it to St Andrews it was too late for a practice round at the qualifying course of Leven Links. Yeh's first sight of the course, which most of the 120-man field had played at least twice, was just before his tee time and the undulating layout must have looked like a moonscape to him.
He asked a friendly local if there were any blind shots off the tee - 'just one, the 10th, laddie' - and he was away. Remarkably, Yeh shot a four-under-par 67 and sliced two shots off that on day two to qualify for the Millennium Open at St Andrews. As one club member who had never shot below 80 in 50 years of playing the course put it: 'The laddie did well, so he did.' Mr Lu, the Taiwanese with the pork pie hat who captured the imagination of golf fans worldwide when he finished second to Lee Trevino at Royal Birkdale in 1971, would also have been impressed. He coached Yeh as a junior and gave him some advice about playing links golf in windy Scottish conditions. As it turned out an up-to-date bus timetable would have been handier - Yeh can handle himself on the links.
Like Yeh, 17-year-old Giovanni Lapentti of Ecuador was faced with a virtual mission impossible - be competitive on an alien surface, grass, in the scary confines of Wimbledon's number-one court against a home player with the backing of a passionate 11,000 crowd.
Amazingly, Lapentti beat Arvind Parmar to send Britain out of the World Group of the Davis Cup. Not only that, the teenager, who played on a grass court for the first time last month, prompted a post-mortem into the 'death' of British tennis. Wonder what the Spanish is for 'the laddie did well, so he did'.
