The start of the season just won’t be the same without Scottish Boys’ Championship

H, the spring is in the air again, muttered this scribe with a gasping wince as I cursed the day I bought that cheap, open-coil mattress. With the Masters looming on the horizon, it’s getting to that time of the year when club golfers, who probably couldn’t tell you the difference between a potted Amaryllis and tub of potted heid at any other time of the season, suddenly get all floral and horticultural as they weigh up a 7-iron into the 14th.

They start gushing about how radiant the Augusta Azaleas are looking while havering on about them being flowering shrubs of the genus Rhododendron and why they tend to flourish in well-drained, acidic soil before settling into the address, embarking on a back swing that was outlawed in medieval times and knifing that aforementioned 7-iron into the bloomin’ gorse.

Yes, the Masters, and all its abundant, flooery furnishings, tends to usher in the proper golf season. There was, of course, that other long-standing occasion which was romantically viewed as another of the traditional curtain-raisers too; the Scottish Boys’ Championship. Alas, it has been moved to a new date in the calendar this year and will now be staged at the end of June and into July, which will no doubt mean it will be lost amid the general frenzy of a jam-packed schedule.

For the dewy-eyed, nostalgic golf writers, it is the end of a glorious era. Even many of the hattered sub-editors on newspaper production desks seemed to have the event seared into their minds. “Oh aye, that one with all the bloody results,” they puffed as they mulled over the annual head-scratching prospect of trying to shoehorn a heaving list of matchplay ties onto a single page.

So off you’d go, scribbling and typing; G Alexander (Ranfurly Castle) beat W McConnachie (Pumpherston) 5&4. But wait. It should’ve been W McConnachie (Pumpherston) beat G Alexander (Ranfurly Castle) 5&4.

And how did you know you’d made a mistake? Because W McConnachie from Pumpherston’s faither would come rampaging into the small press room to complain. “Who’s here from The Herald?” came the menacing question from a quietly seething parent whose son had been denied his moment of glory in print.

“Er, I think he’s out at the far end of the course just now,” came the sheepish, cowardly response from the man from The Herald.

An error in the Scottish Boys’ results could generate more harrumphing