Jasper Stubbs

After hitting the opening tee shot of the 2023 Asia-Pacific Amateur Championship at Royal Melbourne in October, Stubbs was walking up the fairway when his caddie Simon Clarke told him it would be pretty awesome to also sink the winning putt three days later.  

And that is exactly what happened to the player down at 362nd on the world amateur rankings at the time –as a result he earned himself a place not only at Royal Troon, but also April’s Masters at Augusta National.

With only 12 holes to go, he was seven strokes adrift of Yunhe Sampson Zheng, but after a 69 to Zheng’s 75 they were level and also alongside them was another Chinese player, Wenyi Ding.

A 25-foot birdie putt when the trio went into sudden death could have settled it, only for Ding to follow him in. But on the next Stubbs’s par was good enough.

The 2022 New Zealand amateur champion, who lives near Royal Melbourne, said: "My heart rate was going nuts. It’s just life-changing."