Amateur Championship:
Campbell's late slip
By Norman Mair
Electronic Telegraph

IAN CAMPBELL, whose putter had served him so splendidly over the week in the Amateur Championship at Prestwick, failed from four feet on the 36th green to leave Michael Hoey as the first Irishman to take the coveted title for 16 years.

Adding to the drama was the fact that the 21-year-old Campbell, a Welsh international, had been saved from the consequences of replacing his ball wrongly only by an urgent cry from a member of the Fourth Estate.

Much of the golf in the final did not quite live up to what had gone before but Hoey, who has professional ambitions, will presumably have clinched his Walker Cup berth.

Introduced to the game by his father, Brian - himself a semi-finalists in 1970 - Hoey has been a golfer for 17 of his 22 years. The more recent professional advice has been for him to work on squaring up his whole set-up and widening his arc, and thinking in terms of those less than revolutionary tenets he played some good golf at Prestwick.

Nevertheless, what had pleased him most had been his ability, when facing defeat, to escape the axe.

There is no doubting the guts, temperament and touch of the lightly-built Campbell. However, further colouring the argument over the question of whether his game is big enough for the Walker Cup venue, Georgia's Ocean Forest, is the fact that he has been using the Callaway ERC II driver, which is illegal in America.

AMATEUR CHAMPIONSHIP (Prestwick).- Final: M Hoey (Shandon Park) bt I Campbell (Marlborough), 1 hole.