Masters amateur Christo Lamprecht, 6-foot-8, does not have his head in clouds

Christo Lamprecht Sr. kept getting interrupted – by texts, calls and co-workers in the office who saw what was happening.

“I’m busy,” Lamprecht Sr. told them. “What’s so interesting?”

They implored him to check The Open’s leaderboard. That’s when it became clear.

“Oh, my goodness,” he said.

Some 8,500 miles away in Hoylake, England, his college-aged son was setting the golf world ablaze.

Who is this kid? Where did he come from? How is he doing this? At The Open Championship, of all places?

Lamprecht Sr. quickly caught up on the highlights. He saw his son, also named Christo, make routine birdies on Nos. 3 and 5, and hit his approach shot on the par-3 sixth to 4 feet. He watched the chip-in birdie on the 14th and one last one on the closing hole. The younger Lamprecht doffed his cap to the crowd and soaked in the moment as he walked off the 18th green, then signed for a 66 that no one could better on the opening day at Royal Liverpool Golf Club. The senior Lamprecht, an accountant back in his hometown of George, a coastal city in South Africa’s Western Cape, shook his head.

“I just couldn’t believe it,” he said.

That Thursday at Royal Liverpool was Lamprecht’s “Hello world” moment. He didn’t sustain the remarkable play, but the golf world was introduced to another young phenom that day, one who amazed with the power produced by his 6-foot-8 frame.

Lamprecht, 23, earned his place at The Open with his victory at the 2023 British Amateur. Now another major opportunity awaits. He is the headliner among the five amateurs in the field at this week’s Masters Tournament.

Lamprecht, a senior at Georgia Tech, is the top player in the World Amateur Golf Ranking and No. 2 in PGA TOUR University, trailing only Stanford’s Michael Thorbjornsen. History is on Lamprecht’s side, as well. He is the third Yellow Jacket to win the British Amateur, joining two important figures in Augusta National’s history: Bobby Jones, the club’s co-founder, and Charlie Yates, a former low-amateur in the Masters and the club’s longtime secretary.

Lamprecht’s presence is a connection to the past and another step in a bright future. He was a first-team All-American in 2023 and is on pace to earn that honor again this year. He’s finished no worse than T16 in eight starts this season, including a victory at the OFCC/Fighting Illini Invitational (at Olympia Fields) and two runners-up.

He also was just two strokes off the lead halfway through the DP World Tour’s Alfred Dunhill Championship in his native South Africa. It wasn’t just his score that amazed. Lamprecht blasted an incredible 418-yard drive on the par-5 18th hole in the first round at Leopard Creek Country Club.

“No!” a SkySports announcer exclaimed. “That is ridiculous.”

“Everyone talks about it now,” Lamprecht told PGATOUR.COM, pointing out the shot was downhill and downwind, “but it was just another drive down the fairway for me.”

In golf’s distance age, Lamprecht stands alone with rare physical gifts that cannot be replicated. Only four of the 16 players on Georgia Tech’s basketball team are taller than him. He may be taking those talents to the PGA TOUR soon.

The top-ranked player in PGA TOUR University after this year’s NCAA Championship will follow in Ludvig Åberg’s footsteps by immediately earning a PGA TOUR card. The Masters, in addition to giving him invaluable experience on arguably the game’s biggest stage, will count toward those standings, meaning a good finish this week could set him up for so much more than the prestigious low-amateur prize.

The lessons he learned at Liverpool will come in handy.

A major championship allows an amateur to become famous faster than a ball leaves the clubface of Lamprecht’s driver. Five months after The Open, Lamprecht sat on a serene South African cliffside and recalled the week to PGATOUR.COM, which visited him in his home country last December.

“I felt probably every emotion possible throughout that four rounds of golf,” he said.

Lamprecht admits being thrown by the experience, by all the demands that followed his first round. The day was an amalgamation of excitement, gratitude and a heavy dose of “oh s---, this just got real.” He barely made the cut after a second-round 79 and finished T74. But he also was the only amateur to make the cut. And now he has an opportunity to put everything that he learned into practice at Augusta National, a course he’s played numerous times. Georgia Tech is just two hours away in Jones’ hometown of Atlanta.

This week won’t be the first time he’s seen Amen Corner or attempted to knock it tight to the traditional Sunday hole location on 16. There’s familiarity with the course, even if everything else surrounding the week will be different.

With Lamprecht set to see more TV time this week at Augusta National, he would like to address the elephant in the room. Something that has been a hot topic since Royal Liverpool. His swing is… interesting.

If Rory McIlroy and Adam Scott are perfect portraits of the swing, à la Rembrandt, Lamprecht is more like the work of an abstract expressionist. By his own admission, his action is not visually appealing, but while it’s atypical, that’s a product of his lanky frame. His right knee dips abnormally low to the ground at contact as if he is chasing a 70 mph breaking ball low and away. The result is beautiful, though. Lamprecht averages about 325 yards off the tee on a standard course. He’s found the swing that works for him.

“The golf swing doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to be in control,” Lamprecht said.

While most observers obsess over the look of Lamprecht’s swing, another of the game’s sweet swingers says the secret is in the sound.

“As a person that understands ball striking, you don’t have to look at it, you just hear it,” said Ernie Els, a longtime friend of the Lamprecht family. “And at 16 (Lamprecht) had that distinctive hit on the ball. To come from this little town here and to have this kind of talent come out of this area is quite incredible.”

Lamprecht’s growth spurt came relatively late in his development, but at a perfect time for his golf. Lamprecht was required to develop a strong short game because he stood just 5-foot-7 at the start of high school. He loves his lob wedge and likes hitting soft flop shots as much as booming drives. When he practiced as a kid, he wouldn’t let himself leave until he holed a chip and a bunker shot, reminiscent of another South African, Gary Player.

But when Lamprecht started rapidly sprouting, he went through new clubs every six months and pants even faster. His friends called him Melman, a reference to the giraffe from the movie “Madagascar.” Even now, standing 6-foot-8, Lamprecht’s legs are disproportionately longer than they should be for his height. With the maximum legal length of a driver capped at 46 inches, it limits the equipment he can use. His irons are 1.5 inches longer than standard.

This should come as no surprise, given that his grandfather was also 6-foot-8. His great-grandfather, who immigrated from Germany to George and was the town’s first doctor, dentist, and pharmacist before later becoming mayor, was 7 feet tall.

“When you get really tall, in the five percentile of height like he is… the conventional aspects of the golf swing can be thrown out the window because your levers are so long,” said Stewart Cink, the former Open champion and Georgia Tech alum who occasionally practices alongside the team. “It just creates a certain type of leg action and body action that we are not used to seeing. He’s made it his and done a pretty good job of it.”

Bruce Heppler, the Georgia Tech coach, puts Lamprecht in an elite class. “He’s the best I’ve seen in 40 years off the tee and he’s that good around the green, too,” said Heppler, who has led the Yellow Jackets for 29 years and is the 10th-longest tenured head coach in Division I.

Those are bold statements, but the subject of that praise does his best to ignore it. Lamprecht tries not to look too far ahead.

“To think about everything that I want to accomplish and not actually appreciating where I'm at would do myself wrong,” he said.

Lamprecht may be a ceiling-scraper at nearly 7 feet, and yes, the sky is the limit, but he still doesn’t have his head in the clouds. He keeps a tangible reminder on the course, with “CWYC” written on his golf glove. It stands for “Control what you control,” and he taps the glove when he needs a reminder. He added a cross to the end of the acronym recently, a reminder of his faith but also an homage to a friend who tragically passed away in a car accident.

“I’m doing what I’m loving. I’ve got all 10 fingers and all 10 toes and I’m still enjoying the sport. I’ve got a lot of things to be thankful for,” Lamprecht said.

Lamprecht would like to think he’s slowly built toward thriving in these moments. The Open was the most recent, but he’s been stacking these experiences since he was a boy trying to hit carts on the range of Kingswood Golf Course. He refined his game at the Louis 57 Academy, a junior teaching program in the Southern Cape of South Africa founded by Louis Oosthuizen. Before he was a teenager, Lamprecht’s lesson plans were crafted with Oosthuizen’s input. He’d already become friends with Els, as well. His family and Els’ both owned property in Herolds Bay, a beach town southwest of George.

Lamprecht Sr. let his son play alongside him as soon as the excitable junior was strong enough to hit a wedge over the 100-foot tree in their yard. Soon after, Lamprecht competed in tournaments with kids five years older than him. When he reached high school, he ditched tennis, rugby and cricket and put his full energy into golf. And at 16, Lamprecht cemented his status as a prodigy, winning the South African Amateur Championship, becoming the youngest winner in the event’s 110-year history – younger than past winners Els, Trevor Immelman and Retief Goosen.

Lamprecht competed on Junior Presidents Cup teams and twice played the Junior PLAYERS Championship. He was drawn to Georgia Tech after coach Heppler, who had spent time in South Africa, greeted Lamprecht in Afrikaans, South Africa’s native tongue. The recruiting all but ended there; Lamprecht was a Yellow Jacket.

Lamprecht’s stroke average dropped by more than a shot between his freshman and sophomore seasons at Georgia Tech, and he won for the first time in his junior season. In 11 events that year, he notched eight top 10s. He was a finalist for the Fred Haskins Award, given to the country’s top collegiate player.

“He’s just got this unbelievable power on one end of the spectrum,” said Cink. “And incredible touch and finesse on the short little tiny shots around the green that you just don’t see from very many players, especially somebody who is 6-8.”

Lamprecht’s immense talent has everyone buying in. Heppler expects Lamprecht to leave Georgia Tech as one of the school’s best. Cink believes PGA TOUR success will quickly follow. Els envisions Lamprecht as the next great South African golfer.

Lamprecht can’t get there mentally. Not yet. The 23-year-old amateur is focused on where his feet are – firmly planted at Augusta National.