He was great and he wants to forget it all

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/08/2011 (5414 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

EXACTLY one year ago, then-18-year-old Albin Choi played the best golf of his life to win the Canadian amateur at the London Hunt Club.

Today, preparing for this week’s national championship at Niakwa Country Club and Elmhurst Golf and Country Club, he wants to forget it ever happened.

“I played some of the best golf of my life last year and obviously I’d love to have another week like that but I need to forget it ever happened and start with a clean slate and go out there and play golf,” Choi said this week.

“Definitely I have good memories from last year and I think the hardest thing now is going to be to forget all about it.”

Having just completed his freshman year at North Carolina State, Toronto’s Choi was named the ACC’s freshman player of the year. He has taken his momentum to the summer season, winning last month’s Monroe Invitational near Rochester, N.Y.

Other high-profile events like the RBC Canadian Open and the Porter Cup have been on his schedule but it’s clear the Canadian amateur’s defending champion takes nothing for granted.

“This tournament, this game, doesn’t owe anybody anything,” he said. “So you can never be too sure of things. But I feel if I play well, I’ll find the results I did last year. We’ll have to see. I’m still in the process of trying to be humble about things.”

It would be easy to get caught up in the encouragement and his burgeoning resume.

At London Hunt last summer, Choi outduelled B.C.’s Eugene Wong — now his Team Canada teammate and whom many considered the favourite — by three shots in a stirring battle in the final round of the amateur, shooting 66 on the final day to set a scoring record of 17-under-par 271.

Now a member of Golf Canada’s elite development program, there are both support and demands.

“The summer, it’s been pretty good but it’s a packed, full schedule,” Choi said. “We’re almost travelling every week. We might have a week here or there off but so far this summer, it’s been busy for me moving from junior golf to amateur golf.”

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Choi’s appearance at last month’s Open yielded a great experience, he said, even though he missed the cut by two shots after carding 74-72.

“The fairways were good,” he smiled, asked about Shaughnessy’s narrow fairways and difficult, long rough. “Everyone talked about how bad the rough was but I thought the fairways were better.

“I took a lot out of that week and I look forward to going back to the tournament in the near future.”

Choi and the other 239 competitors this week will find ample trouble at Niakwa and Elmhurst but most would agree not to the extent of that found at Shaughnessy or last year’s amateur venues at Hunt and nearby Redtail in southern Ontario.

tim.campbell@freepress.mb.ca