Carnoustie not the only ‘horror’ for Vegas
CARNOUSTIE, SCOTLAND Jhonattan Vegas was forced to do plenty of scrambling before he even teed off in the British Open.
The Venezuelan golfer’s wild journey to Carnoustie started last week and involved an expired visa, a seven-hour stakeout in a car outside a consulate in Houston, a hastily arranged helicopter ride across Scotland and a lost set of clubs.
“It seemed like a horror movie was happening for the past week,” said Vegas. “Even if someone tried to do something like this on purpose, you couldn’t really do it.”
In the end, Vegas played the first round of golf ’s oldest major on one of the world’s toughest courses with some borrowed clubs and a few minutes of practice.
He shot a 5-over 76. “Even though this journey seemed crazy and frustrating at times,” Vegas said, “I just thought that somebody was really playing a joke on me.”
It all started July 12, when he realized he had read the dates on his visa incorrectly and discovered it was out of date. That dashed any hope of getting to Carnoustie a week early for practice, but he thought he could just get another one within 24 hours and rearrange the flight.
Wrong.
His application wasn’t processed until Monday and he was told by the New York consulate he could collect it in Houston, where he lives.
“I waited in a car in front of the consulate in Houston for seven hours, hoping for the visa to show up that day,” Vegas said. “It never did.”
He finally got the visa Wednesday and flew to Glasgow, via Toronto, overnight. He’d arranged with his agent for a helicopter to take him over to Carnoustie so he could register in time, but then he encountered another problem: his clubs never made it out of Toronto.
And that was when Vegas thought someone was playing a trick on him.
“I called my caddie and said, ‘Man, scramble some clubs. Whatever you can find,’” he said.