NORTH BERWICK, SCOTLAND | For once, the winner wasn’t likely to be Scottie Scheffler, while it was even less probable that it would be last year’s winner, Bob McIntyre, who had just made the cut and no more. So in most eyes, it had to be Rory McIlroy.
And if it wasn’t going to be Rory, you could only stick a pin among the list of names that followed, so ridiculously high was the standard at this combined PGA and DP World Tour event at the Renaissance Club.
Instead of Rory, it was a charmer of an American, 25-year-old Chris Gotterup, who was going to have his name engraved on the Genesis Scottish Open trophy. Far from taking fright at playing alongside McIlroy, this one-time winner – at the 2024 Myrtle Beach Classic – had had no trouble in keeping up with this five-time major winner.
With six holes to play, a passing stranger had commented, “I’m like lots of others in thinking that Gotterup would have fallen away by now.”
That much was true. But when, before he set out yesterday, I had asked his caddie, Brady Stockton, if his man was as calm as he looked, he replied, “He’s quite the most laid-back person I’ve ever met.”
Could it stay that way this week at what will be his first Open Championship?
At 3:15 UK time Sunday, five players were jam-packed on the 11-under-par mark – McIlroy and Matt Fitzpatrick along with England’s Marco Penge, whose wife, Sophie, is a former professional who represented GB&I in a Curtis Cup, and two Americans in Jake Knapp and Gotterup. In other words, two major winners and two players in Knapp and Gotterup who were not just looking to win but to snatch one of the three remaining places at Royal Portrush. (In the end, they went to Gotterup, Nicolai Højgaard and Matti Schmid.)
To put it mildly, the evening wind was alive with stresses of one kind or another.
Earlier in the week, there had been a meeting of PGA Tour and DP World Tour officialdom where possibly stress-related complaints from players – they didn’t want to feel obliged to talk to the media – had been on the agenda. Needless to say, no time was wasted in advising the golfers that for their own good, and that of the tours, it had to stop.
“For every player who has a complaint there will be another who doesn’t want to make a fuss. And as often as not it’s because they know that the public look at them and think they’re leading the life of Riley, which certainly isn’t always the case.”
Dr. Andrew Murray
Dr. Andrew Murray, the DP World Tour’s chief medical man, had no problem in understanding how stress can catch up with a globe-trotting golfer. “All those fans out watching today’s final round don’t begin to understand what’s going on behind the scenes,” he began. “They see the players spending five hours out on the course when most of them, like those of us who are there for them, will be putting in 12-hour days by the time they have played and practised.
“For every player who has a complaint,” he continued, “there will be another who doesn’t want to make a fuss. And as often as not it’s because they know that the public look at them and think they’re leading the life of Riley, which certainly isn’t always the case.
“For a start, they have to travel the world, often switching from one continent to another overnight and having to tee up in the next event almost straightaway.”
Next on Murray’s list of player concerns was a combination of how they need to watch their overall physical health, including nutrition, while coping with the relentless pressure which can apply to winners and losers alike.
Everyone knows that mental health is an all-round concern but, such is the extent to which it affects top sportsmen and women that a consultant psychologist and mental health expert by name of Dr. Phil Hopley has been signed on for this golfing fortnight. The doctor thought from 10 to 30 players would want to see him.
Murray, once an adventure runner who took seven days to get from the village of John o’Groats in northern Scotland to the Sahara Desert in Morocco, had been pleased to see McIlroy’s return to his own happy self at the Renaissance. Following his Masters win, Rory had probably done as Murray himself had done in realising that a good rest was essential for anyone who had hit a high in his or her sporting ambitions.
Meanwhile, as one who had worked at the Olympics, Murray mentioned how nothing had made his medical life more fulfilling than when he saw an Olympic medalist as happy with his family as he was with his gold medal.
It was obvious that there was any amount of “stuff” in the players’ minds over the week. “Most of us,” said Ryan Fox, the New Zealander who won this year’s RBC Canadian Open, “will have been thinking of nothing beyond this Scottish Open.” Only then he adjusted that to: “Most of us, but not all of us.”
Collin Morikawa, winner of the Open in 2021 at Royal St George’s, belonged in the second category. He had signed on a new caddie just before the twin events and was wondering how the relationship would work out.
His management team had hit on Englishman Billy Foster who, as luck would have it, was finding his retirement more than a little frustrating.
He had been making a reluctant job of cutting his garden hedge when he got the call from the management men. They agreed on a two-week contract and, after an opening stint on the practice ground last Tuesday, it was a case of “so far so good.”
Morikawa said then that he loved the fact that Foster, who is well-known for his after-dinner speaking, had plenty of amusing stories up his sleeve.
Now whether or not the amusing stories made up for a missed cut on Friday is another matter.
On to Matt Fitzpatrick, who won the U.S. Open with Foster on his bag in 2022.
Now here was a player who was thinking along the same lines as Fox. He said he would only be worrying about Portrush “if my game was horrendous.”
So did that mean he was on his way back to playing as he did in ’22? He chuckled at the suggestion but was not about to deny it.
The screams for Rory could not have been louder at the end of the day. That he was worth every one of them matched up with his own view that he had “got everything out of the week” that he had set out to get.
That sounds promising.
E-MAIL LEWINE
Top: Scottish Open champion Chris Gotterup
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