America at Large: His triumphant duel with Ernie Els at Troon may well have won more than a claret jug for Todd Hamilton. He may well have won himself a trip to Detroit in September as well, writes George Kimball

Officially, the 300 points Hamilton earned for his British Open shot him up to 15th place on the US Ryder Cup table.

Only the first 10 automatically qualify, but American captain Hal Sutton had to be impressed by the steel-nerved resolve the 38-year-old journeyman displayed in dispatching a man who had previously been involved in two play-offs for major championships, and won them both.

The Open play-off was not, technically, matchplay, but it might as well have been - and similar conditions existed in Hamilton's only other US Tour win, which came back in March.

After frittering away a four-shot lead in the Honda Classic, Hamilton trailed as estimable an adversary as Davis Love III, but finished birdie-birdie to win the tournament in West Palm beach.

That's the sort of fellow you'd like to have on your side going into battle, and we make it no worse than even money that Hamilton winds up with one of Sutton's two wild-card selections for the team he brings to Oakland Hills.

His two 2004 tournament wins are more than half the number achieved by the Americans currently holding down top-10 spots - and twice as many as Tiger Woods has managed.

The circumstances of Hamilton's win also provided a big boost for an upstart club manufacturer. Since Hamilton was playing out of a TaylorMade bag and wearing a TaylorMade cap at Royal Troon, most observers, including some television commentators, assumed the utility club with which he chipped from 15 yards off the green to two feet on the final play-off hole to seal Els's doom came from the clubmaker's "Rescue" line, but the Sonartec people were quick to let the world know it had been one of theirs.

Within hours of Hamilton's win, the company dispatched blanket emails to the golfing press under the headline "Sonartec MD gains 'Major' notoriety in the bag of British Open Winner."

(We emailed them back to explain that unless they actually wished to be known as the manufacturer of a notorious golf club, they had misused an often-misused word.)

The curious "transition" club turned out to have been the only fairway wood in Hamilton's bag last weekend, and he put it to good use, hitting the MD Hybrid off the tee and off the fairways, and using it as a jigger to chip around the greens with a putting stroke. Sonartec assumes, probably correctly, that their club will now by flying off the shelves in pro shops around the world.

Hamilton's win represented the final redemption in a vagabond career that had taken him from the Canadian to the Nationwide to the Asian to the Japanese Tours before he earned his US Tour card last year on his eighth try.

In 1991 his backers had decided, without telling Hamilton, to give him one more year: he responded by leading the Asian Order of Merit, which proved to be his ticket to Japan.

"It's probably a good thing I didn't know that this was the last bit of money that the backers were going to put in," Hamilton recalled of the experience.

Hamilton's time on the Asian circuit came long after Vijay Singh had been expelled from that tour for cheating, but as an outsider he often found himself competing on "fourth-rate munis" with the deck often stacked against him.

Earlier last week Hamilton had cited a couple of examples of what he was up against as an outsider playing in Asia.

At one tournament in Korea, he pushed a tee shot close to a blind out-of-bounds. By the time he reached his ball a Korean woman had it in her hand.

"It might have been in bounds, it might have been out-of-bounds," he said. "I'll never know."

On another occasion, in 1992, Hamilton had a one-shot lead in the Makyung Korean Open. He pulled his tee shot left into a fairway bunker, TC Chen hit his down the middle, and the third player in the group, a Korean, hit his into jail well to the right.

By the time the players reached their drives, the Korean's ball had miraculously rematerialised and was back in play.

Chen, according to Hamilton, approached one of the Korean officials and quietly warned: "You need to make sure that ball gets put back as close to possible where it was or else I'll make sure none of your players ever play outside of Korea again."

At Troon Hamilton mapped out a week-long plan to lay up well short of fairway bunkers unless he knew he could hit the ball well past them. He was determined to avoid the bunkers at any cost, and in the end had to play just three bunker shots in 76 holes.

"My bunker play is questionable and the best part of my game is chipping and putting, so I just tend to play to my strengths," he explained.

Although he is a rookie on the US Tour, Hamilton had played in three previous British Opens, the first coming in 1992 by virtue of his Asian Order of Merit title. He missed the cut then, as he did last year at Sandwich. In 1996 at Lytham he finished 44th.

"I knew I was a decent golfer," said Hamilton. "I knew I tried hard, I knew I worked hard. Sometimes I think what kept me back was that I put a lot of pressure on myself to do well, and a lot of times I felt that in tournaments like this, if I happened to get into them, well, I didn't really feel that I belonged."

He belongs now. And he belongs on the Ryder Cup team, too.