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There are two Masters taking place this year, the one you’re watching, and the one you’re playing in. Well. Maybe not you, exactly, unless you can count your handicap on two fingers, but the best player you know, that guy on the school run who used to play off scratch, that cousin who won the sports scholarship, or the uncle who everyone says could have made it back in the day. His name is Brandon Holtz and, if you haven’t spotted him yet, he is, he says himself, “the old fat guy” who has been playing with the two-time Masters champion Bubba Watson this week.
Holtz is 39 and works full time as a real estate broker in Bloomington, Illinois. He plays as much golf as he can but, given that he has two kids, a five-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter, it isn’t nearly as much as he’d like. He is currently 3,262 in the world amateur golf rankings. Which of course means he is a hell of a good golfer. And also that he is ranked a full 3,160 places below his nearest competitor among the six amateurs in the field here. And that’s before you even get to the other 10,000 or so professionals in the Official Golf World Rankings, where he is currently unlisted.
Holtz qualified by winning the US Mid-Am, which is the route into the Masters for amateur players aged 25 and over. The last three players who came in that way, Evan Beck, Stewart Hagestad and Matthew McClean, were all ranked inside the world’s top 100 at the time. It’s hard to say for sure, the amateur records are patchy and only go back so far, but it would be odds-on that Holtz is the lowest‑ranked player ever to qualify for the Masters.
It’s not his first time here, mind you. It’s just that all the others were on the other side of the ropes. His dad, Jeff, who is caddying for him this week, won a patron’s badge in the lottery in 2004, and they’ve been back here pretty much every year since. They usually sit behind the 6th and bet beers on who of the players in front of them is going to end up closest to the pin. This year the patrons there are betting on him. Which is a hell of a thing.
Holtz didn’t even play golf at college. He was on a basketball scholarship at Illinois State. He always had a good swing and was on his high school team, but he says himself that he never really bothered practising. He only took it up seriously after he had finished. He spent his early 20s on the mini tour trying to make it as a pro, but it cost him a lot more than he won. His best finish was second place in the Illinois Open, which earned him $14,000 (£10,400). That was well over a decade ago now. In 2024 he paid $200 to the US Golf Association to have his amateur status reinstated.
There’s been some grumbling among the amateur community that Holtz ought not to have been reinstated as an amateur. “The US Mid-Am was basically built for this in my opinion,” he’s said. “I’m a working man, I got a couple of kids, got a wife. Like, for me, as far as competition is concerned, what else am I going to play in?” The rest of the time, he’s just out there trying to make a living, same as the rest of us.
To be honest, Holtz’s background in elite college basketball is a lot more helpful than what he learned during his short time on the Hooters Tour. “Have I teed the ball up in front of 50,000? No, but have I played in front of 20,000? I have.” He was a shooter. By Division One standards he couldn’t dribble, or dunk, or do much of anything else on a basketball court, but he knew how to shoot under pressure. The Mid-Am is a matchplay event, “mano a mano”, he says, and that suited him just fine.
Holtz won it with his driver, which, he says, is the best club in his bag. Trouble is that he just switched it up, and the replacement hasn’t been behaving. The one he used in the Mid-Am ended up in the USGA Hall of Fame. They’ve shipped it back to him to use this week. It arrived right in time for his opening round, when, if you were wondering, he scored 81 and got an up-close-and-personal lesson in the difference between amateur and professional golf.
“I mean, they rarely miss and their wedges are just incredible. Just the action on the ball, the control they have with it, it’s far in between mid-ams and big-time players.”
But still. “This is a dream come true really,” he said after his first round. “The experience as a whole is incredible. It was definitely not what I wanted to do on the golf course today, but I had a lot of fun. You know, like I said, I’ve kind of already won. I’m 39, chasing a dream and here we are.”
