During a busy couple of weeks in which he was unceremoniously dumped by his caddie, wasn’t (yet) named a Ryder Cup or even a Presidents Cup captain, didn’t come close to winning the World Match Play Championship in Tucson, or manage to haul himself up into the world’s top-50 players, Colin Montgomerie still contrived to get his name in the one place he loves it to be: in the newspapers.
|
The harsh truth is that our tartan hero is, as we speak, ranked the 59th (fell five places this week) best golfer on the planet. Which seems about right, given the gradually deteriorating level of his play over the last couple of years. Certainly, at the age of nearly 45, he is nowhere near the golfer he was when effortlessly dominating the European Tour throughout the 1990s. Where his almost peerless level of performance once made him an almost perennial figure atop leader boards wherever he went, that standard has dropped markedly. These days, Monty talks of “top-fives” or “a couple of top-tens” as his targets. Targets, it must be added, that have proved consistently beyond him. Changed days indeed.
All is not doom and gloom, however. For all that his current professional predicament represents something of a mid-life crisis, there is no denying that Monty continues to represent and provide great copy for journalists nearing deadlines. The Scot instinctively knows what the scribes are looking for and invariably produces the telling or provocative quote with a flourish almost unknown amongst golf’s leading players. If it is less than certain that too many of his fellow European Tour professionals will miss him even a little bit when he does hang up his spikes – the vast majority have yet to forgive him for the rules snaffoo he perpetrated in Indonesia back in 2005 – one thing is for sure, that the press will collectively mourn his retirement. He is, without exaggeration, a walking headline waiting to happen.
Just the other day, the man who was born in Glasgow, brought up in Yorkshire and lives, at least until his upcoming marriage, in London, had a wee pop at the continuing absence of his compatriots from the sharp end of the sport their nation gave to the world. This wasn’t a new theme for Monty – and his view is certainly not without merit – but the suspicion here is that his comments were designed to engineer the predictable publicity they did, rather than provoke any serious debate over the currently parlous state of golf in Scotland. His favourite subject, after all, has always been himself.
“I think we’re going through a transition,” contended the former Scottish Amateur champion. “We’ve been going through a transition for 30 years, like our (presently hopeless) rugby team. We never come out of it really.
|
Sadly, there is much truth in what the eight-time Order of Merit winner says. Although there have been moments of recent glory – the winning of last year’s World Cup of Golf, for example – there hasn’t been much else for Scotland to sing and dance about out on the links. Two years ago, Scottish golf hit a new low when only four sons of Caledonia teed up in the Open Championship at Hoylake, the fewest ever in the world’s oldest event.
Since then, in fact, things have gotten even worse. Back in 2006, there were six Scots in the world’s top-200 players; today there are but four. Monty is still top at 59th, but even most of his compatriots would be hard pushed to name the second-ranked Scot on the list: Thailand-based Simon Yates at 150th.
Anyway, as far as Monty is publicly and pressingly concerned, 59th is nine too many. And, having missed the cut at the Johnnie Walker Classic in India, he has only the Ballantines Championship in Korea and the WGC-CA Championship at Doral left before the cut-off date. So he better get his finger out.
Elsewhere, Monty’s propensity for self-promotion has seen him looking further into the future, first to this year’s European Ryder cup side and then to 2014 when the biennial contest with the Americans will make only its second ever visit to Scotland, at Gleneagles. Monty, not surprisingly, has been talking himself up as a possible wild-card pick for later this year – given his current form, he is unlikely to qualify directly - and then non-playing captain for 2014, when the event will take place just down the road from his soon-to-be marital home in leafy Perthshire.
On the face of it, that second scenario would seem to represent a perfect fit: In Scotland, with a proud nation’s finest-ever Ryder Cup player leading the European hordes into battle. And Monty’s chums in the media have, it must be said, been doing their level best for their man. Over the last few months, a procession of pro-Monty pieces has appeared in friendly publications (not coincidentally, at least two golf correspondents, both with right-wing English newspapers, have been invited to the upcoming Monty nuptials) openly and rather blatantly promoting just such an eventuality.
Significantly, few if any of those glowing articles have included quotes from Monty’s fast-depleting band of chums on the European Tour. Yet again, the spectre of Indonesia - and that dodgy replacement of his ball in a spot barely reminiscent of where he should have played from - hangs over the Scot’s rapidly greying head of hair. Call him ‘Colin No-mates.’
But he shouldn’t – and surely won’t - worry too much about peer pressure. As a pillar of the European golf establishment and a prominent client of the International Management Group that has significant influence at the tour’s Wentworth headquarters and beyond, Monty will likely get his wish and be anointed captain six years hence. For one thing, time is on his side. And for another, were he not to be handed the non-playing role, someone in authority would have to explain to the world just why such an illustrious figure had been passed over. Awkward one, that.
In the meantime, on he goes, travelling the world and picking up the appearance money that did so much to keep him off the PGA Tour back in the 90s, a time when the metronomic rhythm of his full-swing was the envy of all who enjoyed its effortless and natural oiliness. One can only hope that the piles of cash are enough to compensate for what is a slow, inexorable decline into mediocrity, Masters or no Masters.
