Pressure is off now for once-testy ‘Big Monty’
Montgomerie, 53, will play on course where he learned game as a child
TROON, SCOTLAND — The pressure is off Colin Montgomerie. It has been for some time now.
In the prime of his career, news conferences at any of the major championships were a cat-and-mouse game with “Big Monty,” who could go from surly to whimsical and back in mere moments.
The Scot had rabbit ears on the course and certainly off it, too. No one dissected a question, word for word, the way Montgomerie did. A perceived slight or criticism could turn into a nasty verbal tussle.
He’s Mellow Monty now, mostly, because there’s nothing left to prove. No, the 53-year-old has never won one of the four major championships, but he’s got his legacy of eight Ryder Cup appearances and a 2010 victory as the European captain, and all three of his victories on the PGA Champions Tour are in that circuit’s majors.
Not much left in golf to stir Montgomerie … until he arrives at Royal Troon, where the 145th British Open begins on Thursday.
St. Andrews is the Home of Golf. Troon is the Home of Monty. At the 138-year-old links course on the shores of the Firth of Clyde, Montgomerie found his love for the game. He could hardly resist.
Montgomerie’s father, James, now 86, worked for years as Troon’s secretary, and his two sons were schooled in the game at a young age.
Montgomerie said he hit his first shot as a 6-year-old on the children’s course— the same spot set up this week for television trucks, where Montgomerie will do some commenting for Sky Sports.
Montgomerie’s childhood home is only five houses from the clubhouse on South Beach Road.
“It gets emotional in many ways,” Montgomerie said, “when the Open comes to your hometown. There’s not many pros here that have the opportunity to play an Open on their own course where they are members.”
To honor him, Montgomerie has been awarded Thursday’s opening tee shot in the tournament at 6:35 a.m. He’ll play with Englishman Luke Donald and Australian Marc Leishman.
“This wasn’t drawn from a hat,” Montgomerie joked.
Montgomerie’s inclusion in the field is far from honorary. He put his “heart and soul” into it. Absent from the Open for the past five years, Montgomerie entered the qualifier at Glasgow Gailes, shot 66-71, and sat for more than two hours on the bubble for the third and final spot. “Awful,” he said. Montgomerie said he thought about all his close losses — five seconds in majors, twice in playoffs — and how being denied by the length of your fingertips is far worse than being 20th.
“Why didn’t I win?” he wondered to himself. “And this was the same at Glasgow Gailes: I had gotten so close that I wanted to achieve that, knowing what the goal was at the end of the day.”
The score stood up, and then Montgomerie could consider what this appearance at Troon might mean. He has said it could be his Open farewell. He insists the goal is to make the cut so he can soak up the moment with an 18th-hole stroll Sunday.
In two previous Open appearances at Troon, Montgomerie has simply been decent, tying for 24th in 1997 and 25th in 2004.
But with his knowledge of Troon, if things were to fall just right, you never know. When Tom Watson, at 59, contended to the last hole at Turnberry in 2009, it removed any excuses the older players might have.
“If I play the way I did when I won the senior majors,” Montgomerie said, “or I feel as if I’m playing as well as I did in 2005 when I finished second to Tiger [Woods] at St. Andrews, I don’t feel there is any difference.
“The only difference is length … but knowing my way around here, and hitting the ball well off the tee, and knowing where to miss the shots, there’s no reason I can’t do well here. No reason at all.”
No pressure, either. At Royal Troon Golf Club, Scotland Thursday to Sunday TV: Golf Channel, chs. 11, 4 Colin Montgomerie had to play a qualifier to get into the British Open, which begins Thursday at the Royal Troon Golf Club, where his father was secretary.