Here’s Jhonny – barely on time and without clubs
The Open’s first-round leaderboard did not begin to do credit to the 76 shot by Jhonattan Vegas.
Players always point out there are no pictures on the scorecards but, if there were, then Vegas believes they would have come from Stephen King’s imagination.
“It’s been like a horror movie unfolding for the past week,” the Venezuelan said. “Even if somebody tried to do that on purpose, I don’t think they really could have. I just thought that somebody was really playing a huge joke on me. Like Candid Camera or something.”
It was some script, and it concluded with him arriving here on a helicopter with no clubs, less than an hour before his tee-time. And what made it all the more remarkable was that he was actually ready to leave his home in Houston for the airport a full seven days earlier.
It was last Thursday when Vegas, a three-time winner on the PGA Tour, noticed his visa was to expire that day. No matter, it would take only a few days to renew and he would still make it to Angus by Monday evening. Or so he thought.
‘It has been like a horror movie the past week … I just thought someone was playing a joke’
By Tuesday, he was still waiting for his passport to be updated. “I literally waited in a car in front of the consulate in Houston for seven hours, hoping for that visa to show up,” Vegas said. “It never did.”
The document was finally ready on Wednesday morning, but by then the only passage was via Toronto to Glasgow and from there a helicopter to Carnoustie. Very expensive, but Vegas was here on time. “Here’s Jhonny,” one of the caddies bellowed as he ran into the locker room.
The only problem was that his clubs were still in Canada. “I just started laughing at that point,” Vegas said. “Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. So I called my caddie and told him, ‘Man, scramble some clubs, whatever you can find – go ask’. I probably would have played with some member’s clubs if I had to. Well, if you asked anyone in the world ‘look, you’re going to have a chance to play the Open, even with borrowed clubs’, then everyone would take it.”
As it was, Mizuno managed to cobble together a set of irons and Taylormade did likewise with the woods. “Everything was different, including the brand of putter,” Vegas said. “But I grabbed the clubs, hit about 20 balls on the range and gave it a try. But I’d only had two hours’ sleep in a 14-hour journey so it wasn’t ideal.
“No, I don’t recommend it. But we had a laugh about it out on the course. If I’d had a different attitude, I would have broken a few clubs by now.”