Player Profile - Charl Schwatzel

This week’s player profile highlights the career of the 2011 US Masters champion, South Africa’s Charl Schwartzel. Born in 1984 in Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city Schwartzel showed an interest in golf from a young age, he honed his skills on his home course with the support and encouragement of his parents.

From early in his amateur career, Schwartzel had the makings of a champion. His career on South Africa’s Sunshine Tour was highly successful and in 2004 he won the Dunhill Championship, co-sanctioned with the European Tour at the age of twenty. Two years later he was victorious at the Vodacom Tour Championship. In 2010 he won the Africa Open and earlier this year he was victorious once again at the Johannesburg Open.

Like many young South African professional golfers, Schwartzel plays on both the European Tour and the South African Sunshine Tour - since his debut in 2002, he has won six times on the European Tour. By strange coincidence, his first win came on home soil at the co-sanctioned Dunhill Championship in 2004, followed in 2007 by a win at the Open de Espana, beating India’s Jyoti Randhawa. The following year Spain smiled on Schwartzel again as he clinched the Madrid Masters by three strokes over Argentina’s Ricardo Gonzalez.

After winning the 2010 and 2011 Johannesburg Open, a co-sanctioned event in his home city of Johannesburg, Schwartzel broke into the top level of professional golf last week when he won the US Masters at Augusta.

In an action-packed final round, Schwartzel came up from second place to unseat Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy who started the final round with a four stroke lead. Weathering the challenges of a highly technical course and fierce competition, Schwartzel kept his cool – seemingly a South African golfing characteristic – to lift the trophy.

Charl Schwartzel joins compatriots Ernie Els and Retief Goosen in the ranks of major title winners. Golf fans should watch the 26 year old closely as he becomes yet another future contender for world number one.