Columbus — For the would-be teacher, Christmas 1992 was most instructional. Mark Immelman was back home in South Africa, on break from college at the faraway Army town that was a little bit Georgia, a little bit Alabama and a whole lot southern America. He was about to learn his place.

Columbus had been good to Mark. No one talked like him there. All the fried food went Three Mile Island on his stomach. Even the fairway grass was foreign. Still, he returned home that year a Division II second-team All-America golfer, a minor star of a national championship team.

As soon as Mark walked in the door, Trevor wanted to play. Only 13 at the time, the boy barely could wait to test himself against his only brother, the one who always had been his competitive North Star.

My, he had grown.

"I hadn't seen him play for about a year and a half," Mark remembered. "He beat me — not handily — but he beat me. I knew I had a fight on my hands."

It was a Christmas revelation: "That's when I sort of knew that if I had designs to be the best player in the world, I better make sure I could beat my household. If I got a brother nine years my junior who can handle me, perhaps it was time for some new goals. That sort of led me a little more toward teaching. It was some divine inspiration, really."

Demand for lessons rises

It was in all the papers, Trevor Immelman winning April's Masters, the first South African to do so since Gary Player 30 years ago.

Meanwhile, Mark Immelman, 37, tends to his quieter kingdom. He's still in Columbus, in his seventh year as Columbus State University's golf coach. The 7th-ranked Cougars are preparing for this week's Division II Southern Regional in Mooresville, N.C.

From Bull Creek Golf Club he also runs his own instructional academy, where players from around the Southeast come to call. There was a waiting list for lessons even before his brother won the Masters — now imagine how good business will be.

"He's got a huge following of people that come for lessons down there," Trevor said last week. "My caddie and I have a running joke that any time I play in Georgia, [Mark's] more famous than me."

That dynamic may have changed a bit in the past month. Still, there is a great sense of comfort running through this family that the brothers are exactly where they belong now. One on a range giving swing tips in Columbus, Ga. — "I trust I'm an honorary Georgian by now," Mark laughs. The other a Masters champion who is a sensation back home and pretty handy with a Letterman Top 10 list here in the States.

Wasn't Mark the brother who as a child said he wanted to be a teacher? "Although," said his father, Johan, "at the time we never equated teaching and golf."

Wasn't Trevor the one who announced at 6 years old that he would become the best golfer in the world, and did it with such conviction that his father put down his own clubs and devoted his life to building the boy's game?

Seven years later, in a Father's Day card, Trevor included his own vision statement that, yes, mentioned winning the Masters.

And after all, haven't the brothers guided each other to their stations in life?

Mark didn't know it at the time, but whenever he and his little shadow were on the course — Mark well into his teen years by then — there was a champion in the making. You've got to keep up with the older boys, Trevor. You got to carry your own bag. You've got to hit the ball far and straight.

"When I came along, he was the person that I looked up to," Trevor said of Mark. "I always used to follow him around. I followed him to all sorts of different sporting events, and all the sports that he tried, I would hang off him and his friends' coattails and try and do the same things they were doing."

Golf is the family's central theme. Father Johan for a time was commissioner of a South African professional golf tour. Mark has done just about every job in the game — played as a junior, caddied for awhile on the South African tour (where he made the connection that first brought him to Columbus), worked as an agent for a couple of years, coached his brother full-time, and then eventually expanded his teaching role at Columbus State.

It all seemed to point to a Sunday afternoon that ended with Trevor slipping into the world's only fashionable green jacket.

"I was sitting on the back row with my wife watching the ceremony, looking up at the sky and thinking, 'This is surreal, this is what we worked for our entire life,' " Mark said.

Just a week before, Mark had visited Trevor in Augusta and noticed multiple putters in his bag. Not exactly a sign of confidence going into the Masters and its famously serpentine greens. You've got to give me 30 minutes on the practice green, Mark told him. And little brother still listens.

They searched out the trickiest 10-footer they could find and went to work reinforcing Trevor's belief in his stroke. Putts began rolling truer, the doubts began to evaporate and everything was just as it was supposed to be.

Meant to teach

That long-ago Christmas, when baby brother beat him, was not as traumatic as you might think, Mark says now. The clues start adding up after awhile. He was the left-hander who taught himself to play right-handed when his father handed him an old set of cut-down clubs. He was the teammate at Columbus who everyone looked to for advice. Maybe Mark was meant to dissect the swing, not perform it.

"I'm privileged to work with some good players from around the world, and work with a younger brother who is the Masters champion," Mark said.

Trevor has become the family front man. Older brother is his shadow now. And yet who is to say which might have the most meaningful impact on their chosen game, the pupil or the teacher?

The No. 1 player on the Columbus State team, junior Andrew Georgiou, is from the same Cape Town suburb as the Immelmans. The last month has proven to him that your last name doesn't have to be Els or Goosen to be a South African with big golf designs.

"Trevor plays golf at the same golf course I used to play at, he worked hard and he's succeeded at the highest level," Georgiou said. "It makes me think, 'You know what, if he can do it, I can do it.'

"And I got the right coach to put me on the right track."