At the par-five 13th he hit a three-wood to 10 feet and at the next he played a superb chip

At the par-five 13th he hit a three-wood to 10 feet and at the next he played a superb chip. I don’t know what I am doing.”It was the run of three birdies and an eagle from the 11th which put Levet right in contention. “I was playing so awful before this week, I had spiders and ghosts in my mind. It’s unbelievable.” Levet withdrew from the Open qualifier at Sunningdale after one round because he was literally shaking with fatigue Now he has a few headaches but is happy to have them “I have to go home,” he said “This is my last shirt We were going to go on holiday I need to find a hotel for Troon. Marcus Fraser and Gr?ry Havret were also both chasing the last spot in the Open but neither was able to break par in the final round.”Life is strange but golf is worse,” Levet said. He survived a four-way, four-hole play-off before losing to Els at the fifth extra hole.

The joyful Frenchman raised Els in the air when the South African holed the winning putt.It was Levetation again yesterday, this time on the leaderboard as the 35-year-old rallied from seven behind the overnight leaders. “A win is a win but playing in the Open is something else.” At Muirfield two years ago he came within a whisker of winning the Open. He became the third French winner in the last month, an unprecedented achievement for Gallic golf.What could be better than joining a roll of honour at Loch Lomond that includes Ernie Els, Tom Lehman, Colin Montgomerie and Lee Westwood, and collecting £366,660? A place in the Open Championship at Royal Troon this week was the mighty bonus.”This is probably the best thing,” Levet said. And when that did not look like doing the trick, the auld alliance, Mary, Queen of Scots, and all that, was invoked on behalf of France’s Thomas Levet.
With a brilliant stretch of golf on the back nine which would have taken even Sir Logan’s breath away, Levet came home in 29 strokes to claim the title. There was not a local in sight when the Barclays Scottish Open reached its conclusion yesterday afternoon, but in order to put the bonnie into the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond, New Zealand’s Michael Campbell found the memory of his great-great-grandfather, Edinburgh’s Sir Logan Campbell, briefly invoked. It can take some ingenuity on occasions, but the Scots will stop at nothing to find a home link with the winners of their tournaments.

It would be nice if the Scottish Open was on a links as well instead of just coming to the Open I am sure at some stage we will hit a seven-iron 250 yards It can be very difficult to get your head around it There is a lot of guesswork that goes on Probably a lot of caddie-firings happen after the Open It is hard to caddie and hard to play.”. “We just don’t play links golf as we did in the amateur game. It should be no different because you are still hitting a golf shot to a point, it just runs a bit more.”But visually it is very different They are two different fish It is difficult to get into that mode in a couple of days. In one of the brief years of the Scottish Open at Carnoustie, many players, including Montgomerie, departed for the Open on the back of a final round of 80 or above.There is talk of the Scottish Open moving from the lush, soft parkland glories of Loch Lomond to the links of Dundonald but even that may not attract Americans like Tiger Woods, who prefer preparing quietly in Ireland, where you can pick your own tee-times depending on the conditions.Adapting back to links golf in two or three days prior the Open may not be long enough, according to Paul Casey, the former English amateur champion “Probably not,” he said. One of the reasons is that if the weather gets nasty, swings can get messed up in a hurry.

Then, when it comes to playing a slightly different shot, they have so little experience of hitting them that they prefer to stick with what they know.”Exposure to links golf is rare these days for the tour professionals, possibly even shorter than the grass-court season in tennis. But the younger guys simply don’t know any other way of playing.”What the new equipment has done is make it easier to play, and swing, exactly the same way every week. Those who learnt with Persimmon woods, like Woosie, can find it hard to tee the ball up really high as you need to do now It just doesn’t look right. Darren Clarke learnt the game in the wind and he still plays a lot of different shots and Tiger Woods has made sure that he has learnt to play every shot you might need. Not only were there more tournaments on links, but courses like Lindrick would be hard and fast and you had to manufacture more shots.”It depends what generation the players are. If you had 150 yards to the green into the wind, it would probably be a four-iron.”But we would be used to doing that. If you got the ball up in the air too quickly, it would just stop and you could run forward and catch it.