London: When you try to extend that old parlour game of naming famous Belgians to famous German golfers, it is easy to be stuck at just two.
Small wonder, then, that Bernhard Langer likes to refer to Martin Kaymer as his "herr apparent". Kaymer's first major, grasped with such verve in the fading Sunday light at Whistling Straits, should not be bracketed as a bolt from obscurity.
The 25-year-old was in only his second season on the European Tour when, in early 2008, he won the Abu Dhabi Championship before finishing birdie-birdie-eagle to lie one shot behind Tiger Woods in Dubai.
"You have got to watch this kid play," Ernie Els said at the time. "He's going to be something, I promise you."
It has hardly taken long for Els to be proved prescient.
As Kaymer, the USPGA champion after scraping past Bubba Watson in a three-hole play-off, beamed at his reflection on the Wanamaker Trophy, he admitted he was one of Germany's more unlikely sporting heroes.
Switch
In a country obsessed with football to the exclusion of anything golf related — except maybe those two Masters green jackets for Langer — Kaymer himself started kicking a ball around aged three. The switch to golf came about solely because his parents took him to a public driving range when he was 10, and soon a choice had to be made. Kaymer, a keen FC Cologne fan, is convinced he made the right one.
"Obviously, soccer is bigger in Germany than golf," he said. "But for me, I enjoyed being out on the golf course early in the morning by myself, nobody disturbing me. That for me was one of the nicest moments."
Oddly, Kaymer has always claimed that he saved his best form for Europe, explaining that the courses used for majors in the US were more onerous tests.
His record prior to the PGA bore out his theory: a tie for eighth in June's US Open at Pebble Beach was only his second top-10 finish in a major. He has missed the cut in all three of his Masters appearances at Augusta. As such, he remains deferential to Langer, a Masters immortal.
Surveying the list of the PGA winners he joined, from Walter Hagen to Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus to Woods, Kaymer said: "It will take me a while to realise what happened."
On his potential emulation of Langer, he replied simply that his hero had accomplished more than he, in winning the Senior Open and senior US Open in the last month alone.
So for his next trick, he would, he said, set himself no less a goal than winning the Masters.
