When underdogs bite!

Curtis is 27, one of that breed who have been brought up knowing that if they really wanted to compete in a sport which a certain Tiger had quite reshaped, they would have to raise their own commitment levels.

Is it really a coincidence that since Curtis's amazing breakthrough that so many equally unsung contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic have prospered so dramatically. Was it a coincidence that a couple of months after his victory, Shaun Micheel, the world ranked 169, won the US PGA in New York, his first triumph in 164 tournaments?

Did 30-year-old Scott Drummond, ranked 435 and rated a 500-1 shot, think of Curtis when over one weekend at the Volvo PGA Championship at the end of May, he won £420,000 - almost a dozen times as much as he'd collected in a decade as a pro - to win one of British golf 's great prizes?

What we can be sure about is that, one week later, 31-year-old Simon Khan, ranked 255, was thinking about Drummond when he too leapt from utter obscurity after 13 fairly fruitless years to win the Wales Open.

"Watching Scott got me thinking and when my wife said 'you used to play to win too', it helped to change my mindset. You can get into this trap of trying just to have a good finish and not playing to win."

Guys like these are now believers. "Nobody wants to be a one-hit wonder, or be remembered for just one great week," said Drummond, who was teeing off at Royal Troon today, recalling how the last time he was here seven years ago he was in tears because he had just missed out on qualifying for the Open. Now here's a man convinced he can win it and get a place on the US Ryder Cup team, too.

So we should not be surprised when Curtis reflects that none of those players who had pounded the fairways for years without a sniff of a major championship win seemed jealous about his success. "No, I think it gave them more hope than resentment," he said.

Among a few hard-bitten veterans, it perhaps offered something more. Like a whole new lease on life. One of five 40-something winners on the European Tour this year, Barry Lane, 43 and without a win for a decade and 252 tournaments, wins the British Masters. Huh, that's nothing. Across the pond, Joey Sindelar, 46, wins the Wachovia Championship, his first success in 14 years and 370 events.

One of today's earliest starters was Sandy Lyle. The popular former champ is 46 now but he suggests you forget the age and look at the ranking. At 394, he is the closest in the field to the position that Curtis occupied at 396 last year and he was still insisting recently: "I still feel I have a good two or three years left.

"If you are determined enough and put some good information into the old brain box it's amazing what you can get out of it in the end. Then you get a performance like Drummond's, Khan's or Curtis's which can change everything in a tour pro's life in just a week."

There you have it. It may have been Tiger Woods who has raised the bar of performance but it's another fellow who has raised the bar of expectation. Yes, suddenly, everyone seems to believe he can be Ben Curtis for a week.