The Crow’s Nest is an anachronism – a beautiful piece of Masters Tournament nostalgia for a simpler time when a handful of talented amateurs would bunk together for a week of free lodging at the coolest place they’ll ever sleep. It’s a small space with small bunks and cubbies that suited the spartan needs of the mostly college-age kids lucky enough to stay there.
Times have changed, and amateurs don’t crash for the week anymore in the clubhouse of Augusta National Golf Club – just up the steps from the Champions Locker Room. Typically, they’ll spend a night or two before and/or after the Monday night Amateur Dinner just to say they partook in the tradition before heading back to some big and comfortable rental house with family and friends. The Masters has gotten too big for sleepovers and late-night shenanigans while bonding with peers.
The Crow’s Nest simply isn’t big enough for Christo Lamprecht. Bobby Jones, the club founder and greatest amateur to come out of Georgia Tech, didn’t create a space to accommodate the current Yellow Jackets senior who won the 2023 Amateur Championship. At 6 feet 8 inches, Lamprecht is the tallest player ever to qualify to play in the Masters – and he’s too big for any of the modest beds in the cramped room underneath the ANGC clubhouse cupola. To stretch out, Lamprecht would have to sleep on the floor.
“It’s not very big,” said Lamprecht, who has peeked in there before and plans to spend only Monday night after the Amateur Dinner in the Crow’s Nest “for the experience.”
“I think I’m just going to have to just crawl up in a fetal position for one night, but I’m used to it by now. I’ve had a lot of bad experiences in hotel rooms or certain places that have bunk beds. So, I’ll be fine for one night, for sure.”
At No. 1 in the World Amateur Golf Ranking, Lamprecht fits in just fine in his last season at Georgia Tech – where he has no trouble sleeping at a school accustomed to housing basketball and football players at least as tall as the 23-year-old South African. Despite heading to college after becoming the youngest player to win the South African Amateur Championship in 2017, he fulfilled a promise to his college coach, Bruce Heppler, to stay four years until he graduated, never considering turning pro early. Now he is threatening to break the Georgia Tech career scoring average record (70.19 by Bryce Molder) with a career mark of 70.10.
“I think you’re only as valuable as your word,” he said. “Also, I personally needed the four years. I think I’m somewhat ready to turn pro now. My golf game is ready. And I think turning pro in today’s circuit, you’ve got to time it correctly to make sure that I feel like I want to be out there and the first tournament I play as a professional I feel like I can win.”
Lamprecht narrowly ranks second to Stanford’s Michael Thorbjornsen in the PGA Tour University Ranking, to which the top finisher at the end of the NCAA Championship in May will earn a PGA Tour card for the rest of the 2024 season and the top five earn Korn Ferry Tour status. It’s a vehicle that launched Ludvig Åberg to immediate stardom last year.
“But the main focus for me this semester with my college coach was just to focus on what’s ahead of me and what I can control. … I can just control myself.” – Christo Lamprecht
“If you finish No. 1, or even any of the top five positions, it’s a great head start into your career,” Lamprecht said. “It’s insane to think how valuable a head start like that is in pro golf. So, it’s obviously, no doubt, on everyone’s mind and it’s on my mind.
“But the main focus for me this semester with my college coach was just to focus on what’s ahead of me and what I can control. I really can’t control how well Michael Thorbjornsen is playing or any of the other guys on the PGA Tour U rankings. I can just control myself. So, the big goal is, focus on one tournament at a time and one golf shot at a time and not try to get ahead of myself and not try to be my own worst enemy, I guess.”
The immediate professional success of Åberg, U.S. Amateur champ Nick Dunlap and 2022 Amateur champ Aldrich Potgieter in the last year only emphasized what Lamprecht already believed: he and his peers are ready for the next step.
“I’ve said this a lot: I think college golf and amateur golf is probably the strongest point it’s ever been,” he said. “I would argue that there’s probably the top 30 guys in college golf right now who are good enough to play anywhere in the world on any tour, to be fair. So it’s just showing what I’ve kind of been thinking already, and it’s so nice to see that happening, too. It’s a lot of confidence taking away [from their success].”
Lamprecht shouldn’t be too starstruck by the Masters stage next week. He fared pretty well at last summer’s Open Championship at Royal Liverpool, playing with his boyhood idol, Louis Oosthuizen, and sharing the first-round lead with Tommy Fleetwood and Emiliano Grillo at 5-under 66. He eventually finished T74 as the only amateur to make the cut.
“It’s been a week with every bit of emotion felt, kind of coming off a high on Thursday and just not having it the last three days,” he said at Hoylake.
The experience taught him two things.
“My good golf is good enough to compete against anyone in the world at any given time,” he said. “So that was obviously a really nice confidence boost, knowing that I’m on the right path and knowing what I’m doing is correct, and I just got to keep on doing it.
“Then second of all, it’s just I’ve learned in the transition from Thursday to Friday and all the things that went on off the golf course, I’ve got a lot more appreciation for the guys that do it full time, and I learned that side of the golf spectrum. Off the golf course, you’ve got to be just as disciplined as on the golf course.”
With his long frame – a family feature considering his 6-foot-4 father is the shortest male in generations in a family in which his great-grandfather was nearly 7 feet tall – Lamprecht has a natural power game that he typically reins in more than unleashes. A gifted athlete – he played tennis when he was young and enjoys pickleball with his college teammates – he can easily carry drives more than 340 yards.
“Hitting it far is not what I think golf is all about,” he said after even his dialed-back game on the English links at Hillside proved dominant in becoming the third South African Amateur Championship winner in the last six years after Potgieter (2022) and Jovan Rebula (2018). “Stepping out there, hitting it as hard as I can and hitting it 400 yards, it’s fun, it’s cool, but it’s not something I focus on and worry about at all.”
He already was good at golf when a growth spurt forced him to keep adjusting to new clubs every few months for a while until he finally settled into his 6-8 body. His clubs are an inch-and-a-half longer than average and more upright to accommodate a free-flowing and creative swing he calls “not picture perfect.”
“I was growing so fast and my swing changed every week and it was all over the place for like two years there,” he said. “I guess once I kind of finally got to a certain length where I didn’t grow that much more and got a little bit more mature, I figured out where to go, and I’ve just been [maturing] at Tech a lot.”
Whether or not Lamprecht can match his Open accomplishment and snag another silver medal for low amateur in a major, he looks forward to an experience unlike any other.
The only negative effect of his four years in Atlanta is losing much of his Western Cape accent, which for him was always a little more British sounding when he isn’t speaking his native Afrikaans. “Apparently I’m a full-blown American now, which I don’t like,” he said with a laugh of his accent. “It’s bad now, and it’s gone down the drain and I can’t do really much about. Yeah, the Southern accent definitely got me.”
There have been more benefits than drawbacks, however, to playing in college only a couple of hours from Augusta. Lamprecht has had opportunities to attend the Masters but chose not to for fear that he’d be too envious watching others play the course. He didn’t have to wait long for his chance to compete. Already familiar with Augusta National, having played it numerous times on Georgia Tech’s annual trips there – shooting around par each time but never going really low – he knows what his length can mean on the course but also what it requires to score there.
“It’s nice to kind of know what I need to hit off certain tee shots and what exactly is my way around the golf course,” he said.
“A lot of people might differ from this, but I think … the better the driving game has gotten over the last couple years, it’s gotten a little bit less demanding off the tee and a lot more demanding with approach shots. So, I think if my driver’s on in the week and I hit it really well, I can definitely take advantage of a lot of holes and leave myself a lot of short irons into a lot of hard holes. But I think the emphasis for me is trying to get my wedge game and my shorter irons, my scoring clubs, as on point as possible. Out there, we’re talking about half a yard where you can’t miss it in certain spots. … There’s definitely an advantage of hitting it far and straight on any golf course, to be fair, but I think the approach shots out there are so much more important.”
Whether or not Lamprecht can match his Open accomplishment and snag another silver medal for low amateur in a major, he looks forward to an experience unlike any other.
“Obviously, it’s the Masters,” he said. “Some donor told me the other day, he was, like you’ve got three majors and you’ve got the major. And I kind of laughed about it. But it’s going to be a really memorable week for me.”