Cameron Smith is Australia’s newest major champion and golf’s everyman

For the mug amateur, professional golf is borderline witchcraft. For we – the hacker, the chopper, the handicapped – it is impossible to relate to the cognition that golf’s elite have for their game. It is a dark art to simply play in, much less contend for, the Open Championship, the oldest and greatest major hosted by a royal and ancient society at the ‘home of golf’. To win on the Old Course at St Andrews? Well, this is not normal behaviour at all.

It is among the reasons golf fans love Australia’s latest major champion, Cameron Smith. He reminds us of ourselves; he is an everyman who happens to be unbelievably good at golf.

And thus legions of us sat in front of televisions so very early on Monday morning and watched Smith, leading by one over local favourite Rory McIlroy, half-chunk his approach shot on the famous and difficult 17th hole. It left his ball behind a famous pot bunker that protects a famous green that runs near-perpendicular to the fairway and parallel with a famous road and old stone wall. And we put our feet in his Footjoys and our bellies in his Penguin shirt and we thought: what the hell are we … sorry, is he, going to do now?

Smith’s answer was simple: roll the ball onto the green, then roll the ball into the hole. Easy, right? Wrong. And yet the 28-year-old Queenslander shot 64 – the lowest-ever final round to win an Open Championship at St Andrews – and finished 20-under to claim his first major championship by one shot from the indefatigable American Cameron Young.

Keeping it simple has been a Smith mantra since he began playing as a two-year-old at Wantima Country Club in Brisbane’s north. His dad Des was club captain and Smith was at the course every day. Where other parents might spend money