Major Showing

The scratch handicapper left Hong Kong in May to play a series of events in the United States and has been in a rich vein of form ever since. The day after arriving in Los Angeles he played in the Long Beach Senior City Championship and ended up finishing second for the second successive year. He then followed up that showing with a fifth place, alongside his brother Jim, in the Northern California Senior Four-Ball Championship before journeying to Hawaii for business. A last-minute decision to enter the 106th Manoa Cup (the state match play championship and one of the oldest golf tournaments in the States) proved fruitful as Williams dispatched a series of opponents, all of whom were at least 25 years his junior, to reach the semi-finals, where he went down 4 and 3 to Isaac Jaffurs.

"I went 4 down after four holes, which was hard to make up, especially since my putting deserted me and I started missing everything,” said Williams. “But generally in the matches I played well. I hit lots of fairways and greens in regulation and was under par in most of my matches.

"I had to get new irons - Ping i15s to replace my Ping i3s - to conform to the new groove policy, and the Manoa Cup was the first time I ever used them. Lucky for me they worked."