I would just love one of my fellow Scots to win
Americans are coming and world-class players such as Phil and Rickie have won this tournament in the past five years.
Their presence on the course, but more so in the winner’s enclosure, has elevated the event, and the organisers should be proud. Let’s be honest, when a move to the seaside was being mooted at the end of the last decade I was loath to leave Loch Lomond. I claimed then and I claim now that it is one of the greatest inland courses in the United Kingdom, and I do believe it to be a great shame that it is not host of an annual stop on the European Tour.
But I always recognised that its place in the calendar was anything but perfect. My analogy was that it was like playing a clay-court event the week before Wimbledon. Nobody would turn up if they did that. The warm-ups are at Eastbourne or at Queen’s or at Nottingham or at Halle, in Germany, on grass.
People might think that the disparity is not as great in golf, but I assure you it is. Links golf is different, very different. It’s a different strike, a different bounce of the club, particularly with the wedges, especially in a year such as this when we’ve had some fantastic weather. On the softer, more fake conditions of the PGA Tour, the club reacts so differently when it hits the turf. So you have to make allowances, clipping it off the surface almost. Plus there is the requirement to play knock-down shots into the wind and to be able to control the ball in the gusts. And that’s just the technique. It is wildly contrasting on the imagination front as well. You are not just hitting at targets, saying to yourself and your caddie, ‘Well, it’s 180 yards to the flag and it’ll stop immediately – so that’s 180 yards, then.’ On the firm and fast links, you have to be rather more creative, visualising where you might have to land a ball to use the contours to run it up to the flag.
Depending on the conditions,
‘The field brims with quality and is one of the most impressive in terms of world rankings’
you might be dropping it 50 yards short. That is hard to do unless you have “the feel”. And sorry, but you only get “the feel” the more you play links golf.
Tom Watson is the modern links master and he showed the Americans how to embrace the challenge. He tells a great story about his first time ever playing this type of golf and him losing a ball down the first at Monifieth, the links up there by Carnoustie. Tom hit it straight down the middle and could not accept how unlucky he had been – he eventually found it in a pot bunker, 50 yards past where he thought he had ended up. He struggled with that concept at first, but boy did he learn just to take the links rough with the links smooth and move on. Again, you will only ever learn that with experience, and Gullane will offer that in spades.
But it will do so lightly and not overly severely, like it did at Carnoustie when the Scottish Open was moved there for a few years in the Nineties.
I’m glad the R&A later decided it did not want the courses on the Open rota to be used for Tour events. Carnoustie was way harder in 1995 than St Andrews the following week, and players went down to Fife having lost their swing in the gale-blown rigours of Angus. There is a balance.
Gullane is ideal and I wish I was there. But I am playing in the Seniors Players Championship on the Champions Tour and it is one of our majors. There is a lot of interest in the Scottish Open in America, though, and I will tune in – and the memories of my Scottish Open win in 1999 will flood back.
It is right up there in my achievements and second to none in the emotion it evoked. I had suffered a few close misses and I’ll never forget the first round at Loch Lomond, when a young teenage upstart called Sergio Garcia came in after his first-round 62 and said, “It should have been 59.”
I was muttering to myself, “Oh, blimey, I’ve another Tiger on my hands!” I managed to come through to deny Sergio and it meant a lot. The crowds cheering, the Saltires waving, the bagpiper coming down from the castle … just a wonderful feeling of being Scottish.
I would love one of my countrymen to experience the same this week – Russell Knox, perhaps, after winning on Sunday in Ireland, or Marc Warren, my partner from when we won the World Cup who has been close a few times. They would go forward to Carnoustie feeling 10 feet tall.
Colin Montgomerie is an ambassador of Aberdeen Standard Investments – Proud Worldwide Partner of The Ryder Cup.