Ernie Els is desperate, as he puts it, "to get some more out of this year" as a golfer.
And time is running out as he has just two tournaments left in 2007, the Alfred Dunhill Championship beginning at Leopard Creek on Thursday, and next week's SA Airways Open at Pearl Valley, where he is the defending champion.
He did win the World Match Play for a record seventh time in October. But that has been the 38-year-old's only victory of 2007.
And victories are what the world No5 needs if he is to have any chance of succeeding in his three-year plan, hatched 12 months ago, to unseat Tiger Woods as world No 1.
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"I've got two years left, and I still believe I can do it," the big man said during the Nedbank Golf Challenge at Sun City last week where he was hoping to notch a record fourth title.
That never materialised as his putting let him down and he finished third behind Trevor Immelman and Justin Rose. It's not that Els is a poor putter, it's just that one or two five-footers not dropping often means for him the difference between winning and not winning.
The rest of his game remains top-notch. He has had nine top 10 finishes worldwide (two of them in Majors) this year, and if his putter had been a touch hotter there could have been several more victories in the bag.
Els is fond of Leopard Creek, where he won the Dunhill two years ago when he came from behind to beat a faltering Ulrich van den Berg.
Immelman is not playing this week, neither is Retief Goosen, but Els will still have to be at his best if he is to finish in front of some of his young and talented fellow-South Africans who all won on the 2007 European Tour.
Charl Schwartzel captured the Spanish Open, Anton Haig the Johnnie Walker Classic and Richard Sterne the Wales Open.
So here are three golfers who can beat the best on their day, while Louis Oosthuizen has also had a superb season winning the Dimension Data Pro-Am, the Telkom PGA Championship and the Platinum Classic.
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