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SYDNEY - Scott Draper hopes he will no longer be treated as a "sideshow" at professional golf tournaments following his breakthrough win in the NSW PGA Championship.
The former Davis Cup tennis player, who last month knocked back the opportunity to become Lleyton Hewitt's coach, fired rounds of
70, 66, 67 and 65 to win the Von Nida Tour event at Riverside Oaks in Sydney last weekend.
The prizemoney of A$16,500 ($18,875) was less important to Draper than the confidence he gained in coming from four strokes behind and holding his nerve on the back nine on Sunday afternoon to win by one shot.
He made just one bogey all week, a testament to the powers of concentration he honed on the tennis court.
"It's given me confidence that I can make it as a golfer - absolutely," Draper said.
"It gives me a bit more credibility as well. I think before people thought 'Scott can play but he's still probably a bit of a tennis player and a sideshow act in golf'.
"Now there's a bit of credibility there, which will be nice."
Draper, a former junior Wimbledon tennis champion who reached No 42 in the world rankings, believes he has the game to achieve his ambition of playing on the PGA Tour in the United States.
After his win, Draper jumped straight on to a plane to Adelaide and teed up the next morning in the qualifying event for the Jacobs Creek Open at Kooyonga this week.
He shot two-under 70 around Blackwood, a course he'd never seen before, but just missed out on the four spots available into the main draw.
Draper will contest the New Zealand PGA Championship in Christchurch which, like the Jacobs Creek Open, is co-sanctioned with the secondary Nationwide Tour in the US.
That's his favoured route to the main PGA Tour and he will go to the US in June, prepared to play qualifying events week in, week out, just to get a toehold on the ultra-competitive secondary tour.
"I'm not daunted by it," he said.
Tenacity runs in Draper's blood.
The sportsperson he admires most is his first cousin Petria Thomas, who came back from multiple shoulder reconstruction operations to win three swimming gold medals at the 2004 Athens Olympics.
As a young man Draper had to overcome the crippling symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) to make it in tennis.
The OCD was so serious that he was taking up to three hours to go to bed each night, obsessively straightening things in his room.
"It was unbelievably weird stuff," he later recalled.
"I knew I was losing the plot. It got hold of me. I was consumed by it."
Draper succeeded in putting it behind him when he moved from Queensland to Sydney to try out on the satellite tennis tour.
Then, when he was at the peak of his tennis career he had to nurse his young wife Kellie through the final stages of cystic fibrosis, and it was after she died in 1999 that he sought escape from grief by playing golf, often with tennis mate Jason Stoltenberg.
Draper has no illusions about the difficulty of being a crossover professional sports champion.
Many have tried, and failed, including stupendous talents like Ivan Lendl (tennis to golf) and Michael Jordan (basketball to baseball).
The hand-eye co-ordination Draper brings from tennis helps make him an outstanding ball striker, but he knows he needs to work harder on his putting and wedge play.
"Historically, ball striking has been the strongest part of my game and my short game's been trying to catch up," he said.
Draper's coach, Dennis McDade, believes his pupil has a bright future.
"He is a genuine [golf] talent," McDade said.
"He's a smart guy and he knows what it takes to reach an elite level."
Draper credits a recent chat with McDade with giving him the impetus to win his first tournament.
"In tennis when I started playing satellites, which is I guess a similar level to what a Von Nida Tour is, I got to the next level pretty quickly.
"Recently I was thinking that I've been doing this [golf] two or three years now and it was time I started winning some of these things.
"Dennis convinced me ... I probably already had what it takes to win. I think I ... went in there with the right frame of mind and got the job done.
"Obviously I still can improve by quite a fair margin, but I can feel the hard work I've been doing is paying off."
- AAP
