Dave Sampson - from competition winner to Ryder Cup course designer for Marco Simone Golf and Country Club

Dave Sampson was busy packing for a flight from the UK back home to South Africa when a golf magazine landed in front of him. A competition to design a golf hole had caught his friend’s eye, and he urged Sampson to enter and indulge a passion that had until that point been nothing but a distraction from the more traditional building architecture work that was paying his bills.

Ad As he hastily sketched out some designs before making a dash to the airport, little did he know that he was laying the foundation for a career gear change that would eventually propel him to centre stage at the 2023 Ryder Cup. Ryder Cup'I wish they could play' — Rahm wants LIV Golf players to compete at Ryder Cup20 HOURS AGO “I'm a qualified building architect but got into golf course design, which is where I always really wanted to be, by winning a design competition, which was run by Golf World magazine in collaboration with European Golf Design,” recalls Sampson, sitting beside the Marco Simone course in Rome that he has completely redesigned and which will host the eagerly awaited match play showpiece this time next year.

Sampson not only left his mark at the Linna Golf Resort in Finland, where his competition-winning design eventually became the 487-yard, par-5, 15th hole, but also on European Golf Design (EGD), the course design arm of the broader European Tour Group. “I eventually came back over to the UK, and I took a job as cricket analyst for Surrey Cricket Club as I knew it would also give me quite a bit of time to pretty much teach myself and learn the trade of golf architecture,” added Sampson, who joined his current employers in 2004 as a design associate.