Christo Lamprecht is bringing his long ball to the PGA Tour next season.
Lamprecht, 24, averaged 331.1 yards off the tee this season on the Korn Ferry Tour, which tied for first with Chase Sienkiewicz, and graduated to the big leagues on Sunday after finishing ninth on the season-long points list. He won’t be hard to miss: the native of George, South Africa, who played his college golf at Georgia Tech, stands 6-foot-8-inches tall after a major growth spurt during high school, leading friends to jokingly refer to him as Melman, a reference to the giraffe from the animated movie Madagascar.
Height runs in the family genes. Lamprecht’s grandfather also stood 6 feet, 8 inches, while his great-grandfather was 7 feet tall. His father, Christo Sr., stands a mere 6 feet, 4 inches.
Lamprecht, who won the 2023 British Amateur and ranked No. 2 in the 2024 class of PGA Tour U, secured his first Korn Ferry Tour victory at the Pinnacle Bank Championship in Omaha on Aug. 10 by holing out a bunker shot. Just a week earlier, he got engaged to his longtime sweetheart.
“It’s definitely the best two weeks in my life so far,” he said, “so can’t complain.”
Life is good when you’re 24 and bound for the PGA Tour.
GWK: Let’s start with your dramatic Korn Ferry Tour win because that was awesome. What was it that got you going that week?
CL: We were in the midst of a six-week stretch on the Korn Ferry Tour and I played three weeks in a row and I was playing good golf but just kind of didn’t put four rounds together. Just decided it’s been a long time coming to get engaged with my fiancée so I actually took Utah week off, the week before Omaha, and got engaged that Monday. We went to the Cayman Islands for a whole week, and I didn’t touch a club and so I just felt really refreshed and kind of happy inside and really chill about the week. The ballstriking continued as soon as I got back and I picked up where I left off and I just played a lot of stress-free good golf.
GWK: Coming down the stretch in Omaha, did you feel like the tournament was there for the taking? What was your mindset?
CL: It was kind of funny. I’m normally a guy that is locked in with the leader and what is going on and knows what everyone else is doing but they didn’t have a boatload of scoreboards out there and the only one on the front was on eight. So we get to 8 and I’m 3 under at the time and I thought I’m pretty close to what I guess would the lead but the scoreboard wasn’t working for some reason so I had no idea that Robbie (Shelton) was almost 20 at the time. And I’m actually glad that it didn’t work because I probably would’ve pushed a little harder coming to the back nine. At the start of the day, I set a goal for myself to be 20 under and we just kept on trying to push towards that.
GWK: You said the 18th hole had been good to you all week. Take me through the magical moment.
CL: I leaked my driver right and had a horrific lie in the rough so we’re just trying to hack out something that just could possibly get me to either in the bunker or left front edge of the green and I was fortunate enough that it landed in the downslope of the bunker and rolled all the way up to the front upslope so it made the bunker shot a tad easier, for sure.
GWK: Did you feel like it was the type of bunker shot you could make?
CL: I definitely felt like I could get it close. I felt like I could just pop it out on the green and it’ll trickle close. I felt like if I got up and down I’d give myself a good chance at least to get to a playoff. Holing out like that was pretty special.
GWK: What was the celebration like?
CL: It took a while to kick in. My South African friend, Barend Botha, finished up on the front nine just before I did so he saw the commotion and came over to congratulate me and poured some water all over me but it was hard to celebrate when you have a six a.m. flight the next morning. But my agent flew in earlier that day and so we had some steaks and good wine for dinner and it was awesome.
GWK: What has the transition been like for you going pro and seeing some of the guys that you competed with in amateur and college golf getting off to quicker starts than you?
CL: Last year, the six months I had out here on the Korn Ferry Tour was kind of an adjustment. I have never in my life played that much golf. I always had time to practice to get ready for golf tournaments and it was kind of just like this ongoing circus and I never felt like I could get off for three seconds. That for me was a big adjustment and kind of adjusting my game to what the Korn Ferry demands. I think college golf is a little more focused on shooting two or three under and out here you gotta go 5 under or below every single day. It took a little while for me to adjust. It kind of gave me some motivation to see guys I played against have success – if they can do it I can do it mentality. Yeah, it might’ve been frustrating at times not seeing my name up there and but it was nice motivation, knowing that it’s around the corner.
GWK: How long have you had your cousin on the bag?
CL: That’s been since I turned pro in June last year. We grew up together about five houses down from each other. We spent about six or seven days together a week. It’s been something that we’ve talked about our entire lives as kids and he was really good at cricket and so I always said if my golf doesn’t work out and his cricket works out, then I’ll become his manager. He’s been like a brother to me and it’s awesome having him on the bag 24/7.
GWK: Who’s longer you or fellow South African PGA Tour rookie Aldrich Potgieter?
CL: I think if we play a tournament round of golf, I think Aldrich is longer, but I think if we go and mess around at the back of the range, I might get him a little bit on speed, but he hits it a country mile and he hits it really straight most of the time. But I’m more impressed with his power. I’m 6’8” and just use gravity to my advantage, whereas it’s pretty awesome to see his body moving and kind of the way he creates speed. He’s something to see close up. I don’t know what they feed us down in South Africa.
GWK: When did you hit your growth spurt?
CL: I was slightly above average starting high school, 5’7”, but in my first two years during high school is kind of when my length all of a sudden just came about. I think I grew a foot the first two years in high school. When I left high school, I was 6’8” and luckily I haven’t grown much since.
GWK: How did you wind up at Georgia Tech?
CL: It was kind of a crazy story. A friend of a friend works in College Fellowship. He grew up with my sister funny enough in high school and his parents still live really close to my parents in the same town. And I always wanted to come to college. Coach Heppler saw me at TPC Sawgrass playing in the Junior Players and he was intrigued with me, but he wasn’t sure whether I was interested in coming to Tech. My friend served as a middle man and suggested I check it out. Tech was one of my first visits that I went on, one of the four or five I made. The first time I went there Coach Heppler greeted me in my home language and I was like well either you’re really good at pleasing people and knowing how to get a smile on someone’s face or you actually know my language and then he started talking that he spent 3-4 years down in South Africa on a Missionary trip and so I hit a little bit, knowing my language, knowing where I’m from and kind of really resonated with me, and I think we just clicked from the get-go, and it was a very clear decision of where I wanted to go for four years and play for someone.
GWK: Who was your hero growing up?
CL: The history of South Africa golf is pretty rich for a small country. We have a family beach house in Herold’s Bay two doors down from where Ernie Els resides most of his time when he comes back. So, growing up and seeing him on my porch a couple times and being a four-year-old, five-year-old kid that just starting out playing golf and hearing about this big name, Ernie at the time and he was at the top of his peak, it was awesome. I looked up to him a lot, and just listening to some stories and sitting on the porch late night at my uncle’s and just listening to some cool story. Then Gary Player is instrumental for what golf is today in South Africa, and then on more of a personal level in terms of who I credit a lot for my golf game was Louis Oosthuizen, just because I was in his golf academy as a kid in high school and became like my mentor in a sense. I still talk to him frequently and bounce ideas off his head and ask him questions on a regular basis. He’s someone that I look up to and call my mentor, someone I have a lot of respect for.
GWK: What was the biggest change that swing instructor Justin Parsons has made to your game that you think helped you get to the winner’s circle?
CL: About 85 percent of the stuff that we’ve worked on since August has been all set up. Some people won’t believe that I’m standing at least a foot to a foot and a half closer to the golf ball on my long irons, just using more of my big muscles to hit the golf ball. A lot of fundamental stuff that was kind of lacking. When we first started seeing each other he politely said to me, “You’ve been even really good at making shit work, but to make it as a professional golfer, you are going to have to be more solid than that.” It’s been great grinding out the fundamentals with him and just learning each and every day and trying to get a little better one day at a time.
GWK: What did what did you learn from having that great first round at Liverpool at the 2023 British Open?
CL: Hopefully one day I’ll be walking down 18 the last day, not the first day with my name on top but it was awesome to take the world by storm a little bit and it was cool to see that my good golf is good enough to compete with anyone. That was kind of the main takeaway I had. I need to pick up the loose ends and clean up all around. That’s the difference between a guy like me and Scottie Scheffler. He hits a lot better bad shots than I do. I felt like I was ready to turn pro and that experience of being in contention early on will serve me well hopefully in my future.
GWK: I have never been to South Africa. What’s your favorite golf course there?
CL: I grew up really close to a golf resort called Fancourt. They had the 2003 Presidents Cup there and it’s home to three golf courses that are all immaculate but the one called The Links at Fancourt is a little separate from the other two golf courses and it’s the best in the country. Every single time I go home, I pull some favors so I can get out there. It’s an unbelievable place, and a five-minute drive from my house, so it’s pretty awesome to go back and go play there.
