Knost Now Chasing History

By Dave Shedloski

San Francisco – In his first golf match as a freshman at Pilot Point High School, Colt Knost finished first.

"I got a taste of success early," the Texas native said, "and I’ve just kept going."

Colt Knost, trying to become the sixth player to win two USGA championships in the same year, shakes hands with Nick Taylor after winning. (John Mummert/USGA)

That same formula – early success – continues to serve him well in the 107th U.S. Amateur Championship. As he had done in his previous three matches at the Lake Course at The Olympic Club, Knost on Friday jumped out to an early lead in his quarterfinal match against Canada’s Nick Taylor and road his ever-growing wave of momentum to a 5-and-4 victory.

"My first match I played awful and then yesterday I played pretty solid. Today I hit it really good," said Knost, who faces Jhonattan Vegas of Venezuela, a 3-and-1 winner over Cheng Tsung Pan of Chinese Taipei. "If my putter would have been going, it would have been over real early. I hit it pretty solid. I was three under and I think I missed four putts inside six feet, so it could have been pretty good."

As it was, Knost eliminated Taylor, 19, a sophomore at the University of Washington, in a match that took about 2 ½ hours.

"He didn’t make many mistakes all day. That makes it tough to come back," said Taylor, who, contrarily, struggled early with his putting and failed to keep pace. "I fell behind and I had to press. I had to start firing at some pins, and put myself in a couple of bad spots."

Knost, 22, the reigning U.S. Amateur Public Links champion, has never trailed in this championship in running his match play winning streak to nine. He won the opening hole for the fourth time in as many matches, getting up and down from 40 yards for a tap-in birdie – the third time he has birdied the par-5.

"I’ve just put the pressure on my opponent every time," Knost said.

Though he bogeyed the second to give the lead back, he quickly regained it with a 4-iron to 2 feet for birdie at the 241-yard, par-3 third. That started a run of four straight winning holes for Knost, who birdied the sixth and seventh with a pair of 6-foot putts and won the fifth when Taylor missed the fairway and didn’t reach the green until his fourth stroke on the way to a double-bogey.

"It’s tough out there," said Knost, who hasn’t seem flummoxed by Olympic’s strategic challenges. "If you mis-hit it and got it up in the wind, it could go anywhere. That’s what happened to Nick out there. He didn’t hit it that solid and put himself in some bad spots."

From No. 8 on, Knost essentially played prevent defense, using his driver to put his ball in position for routine pars. He missed only two fairways in his round and acknowledged that his driver is the club with which he is bashing his opponents.

"I've just been keeping it in the fairway," he said. "If you keep it in the fairway you really don't have that long of irons into these greens. The hard part is getting it in the fairway though. But once you do, you can attack, the greens are perfect. And my iron game has been pretty solid this week.

"I can just go ahead and wear people down."

That is exactly what he did to Taylor, even while missing a series of short putts and even three-putting the 11^th from 20 feet to allow Taylor to escape with a halve. He followed up that miscue – just his 11^th bogey in four matches, with an 8-footer for birdie to go 5 up. The match ended at 14 when he two-putted from 50 feet. The second was a 7-footer that allowed him one fist pump and a sigh of relief.

Knost is only two wins away from joining Ryan Moore as the only men to win the U.S. Amateur and the U.S. Amateur Public Links in the same year.

"He definitely has a very good chance of winning this thing," Taylor said afterward, classifying his week as a success in his first U.S. Amateur. "He’s playing well. He’s not making many errors."

"I feel like I’m getting better and better every day," Knost said. "I’m enjoying it. I like going head-to-head with another player. People see me as laid back, but I want to win. And I like match play, because every shot doesn’t matter. You make an 8 you just forget about it and move on and try to birdie the next hole. It’s a fun way to play."

Especially when you are in command of your game, which Knost appears to be.

"I definitely want to win this thing a lot," he said. "It would be a great follow-up to the Public Links. But I think that if you look at it, I’ve got Walker Cup already and I’ve got Augusta (the Masters) already, so, I mean, it would be a great honor to win, but you can’t be afraid to go out there and do it."

Dave Shedloski is a freelance writer whose work has appeared previously on www.usamateur.org.