Curtis Luck

Luck is one of those rare amateurs who not only qualify once to play in the Masters, but twice in the same year. He won both the U.S. Amateur Championship and the Asia-Pacific Amateur Championship, both of which come with exemptions into the Masters. He won eight straight holes in the U.S. Amateur championship match on the way to a 6 & 4 win against Brad Dalke at Oakland Hills to become the third Australian winner after Walter Travis (1903) and Nick Flanagan (2003). He came from seven shots back in the final round to win the Asia-Pacific Amateur.
His early interest in golf dates back to when his father, Stuart, bought him plastic clubs, which he used to wield in the backyard as a youngster, the occasional ball finding its way over the fence to the neighbor�s place. Golf wasn't his first choice. Luck loved basketball but to the surprise of his father, he gave up that sport for golf. At 10, his passion for the game grew as he played in the junior golf program at Cotteslow Golf Club in the Western Australia town of Swanbourne, just outside Perth. He won the state junior title at 15 and his career rocketed upward. He had a number of achievements as a junior golfer: Curtis won the 2012 Newman and Brooks Junior Championship as well as the 2014 Victorian Junior Masters and Western Australian Amateur. He also was the Australian Amateur runner-up in 2014.
In 2016, Luck won the Nexus Risk TSA Group WA Open, which is a professional event on the Australia tour. With that win, he started gearing up to become a professional, but those plans changed with his U.S. Amateur victory which gave him exemptions into the Masters, U.S. Open and British Open in 2017. Two months later, he won the Asia Pacific Amateur Championship in Korea, and his final-round 67 was a shot better than Brett Coletta. He came close to winning another professional event in Japan, finishing T-5th at the ISPS Handa Global Cup. Luck got into the Australian Tour majors and finished T-11th at the Emirates Australian Open.
In 2017, Luck received one more honor when he reached the No. 1 spot in the World Amateur Golf Rankings right before the Arnold Palmer Invitational, making a five-year dream a reality. Craig Bishop has been Luck's coach and said that Luck was No. 1 because of "six years of hard work."