Scott Vincent’s great run in 2018 continued on Thursday after he opened his Dimension Data Pro-Am with a 67 on The Links at Fancourt.
The tournament is played on all three courses at Fancourt, and with rounds on Montagu and Outeniqua ahead of him before the third-round cut, Vincent is ideally placed towards the top of the leaderboard and the course widely viewed as the most difficult of the three now firmly in his rear-view mirror.
‘It’s nice to get this course done very quickly,’ he said.
‘We got to play it in pretty good conditions. The rain was light and there was virtually no wind. I played really nicely so I’m happy to get that out the way. I’m looking forward to trying to do some good damage on Outeniqua and Montagu.’
The Zimbabwean started his year by qualifying his way into the BMW SA Open, and then finishing the world’s second-oldest open championship in a share of fourth. He followed that by returning to the Asian Tour where he plies much of his trade, and took a share of 10th in the Leopalace21 Myanmar Open.
He was solid, if unspectacular, with 39th in the Maybank Championship and a share of 26th in the ISPS Handa World Super 6 in Perth.
But there is something about his game that is pointing to an imminent breakthrough.
‘I just picked up one of the new drivers from Callaway,’ he said. ‘That has been a huge plus to my game. But the whole game is slowly starting to piece together again. We hit these up-and-down swells in our careers, but when it’s going in the right direction, everything starts clicking together.’
The confidence in the driver is important, because Vincent is sneakily long with it. He’s third on the Asian Tour driving distance list at an average of a shade over 308 metres, so when it came to the tight Links, being straight with that was a big help.
‘I haven’t added a whole lot of distance, but the driver is supposed to tighten up the misses a bit,’ Vincent said. ‘I kept in play here today, which is crucial, and I hope I can free myself up to swing it a bit harder on the next two courses.’
Credit: Sunshine Tour
Photo: Petri Oeschger/Sunshine Tour/Gallo Images
