Trophy Strife

The obvious irony—and the root of his problem—is that hardly anyone remembers who finished first. Mention “Carnoustie 1999” to any golf fan and the image that surely comes to mind is of the eventual runner-up in that endlessly controversial British Open, a goofy-looking Frenchman standing knee-deep in the Barry Burn with his trousers rolled up. Few think of the tall, dark-haired Scot who, about two hours earlier, had completed a startling four-under-par round of 67 over what many regard as the world’s toughest course.

Not that anyone can really be blamed for such an oversight. For one thing, as Jean Van de Velde hacked, waded and clowned his way through his unforgettable Inspector Clouseau/Jacques Cousteau routine, the soon-to-be “champion golfer of the year,” Paul Lawrie, was quietly and unobtrusively hitting balls on the range in preparation for the four-hole playoff that would change his life forever.

Which it did, but not always in ways you would expect. With the trappings of unlikely major success have come an ambivalence and resentment only multiplied by the inevitably greater scrutiny and questioning of Lawrie’s every move—or non-move in the case of his unwillingness to embrace the PGA Tour after a victory most felt belonged to the other guy.

“There is no doubt that Van de Velde gave it away,” says former Portuguese Open champion Adam Hunter, Lawrie’s coach from 1998 until their split last month. “Or that he was unlucky. But that is not Paul’s fault. And it doesn’t make Paul lucky either. He went out and took his chance. I kept telling him to look at the claret jug on his mantelpiece and just smile. They can’t take it away from him.

“He’s never said this to me, but, deep down, maybe he feels he didn’t deserve to win an Open,” Hunter says. “Maybe that’s why he is torturing himself with it. Who knows? It’s easy to say he should enjoy it more, but he has to allow himself to do it.”

Strong words for sure, but there are two distinct sides to this tale. Hunter speaks only of the on-course Lawrie, the man who has not won since 2002 and only twice since becoming Open champion and has slumped as low as 270th in the world. The former coach does not bring up the happily married father-of-two whose home life and relationship with his local community is something of a model for all professional golfers.

Still, for all his sense of well-being away from the links, Lawrie is straight enough to admit the veracity of Hunter’s words. Up to a point at least. “If I am honest, I’d rather have won the Open by making a great par up the last,” he concedes. “But I didn’t and nothing is ever perfect. I tried to change it for a long time. And it upset me for a long time that I didn’t seem to be getting the recognition I felt I deserved. But I eventually realized I couldn’t change what people thought.

“So I’ve learned to put up with it, even if it is a bit galling to pick up a golf magazine and see photos of Jean in the Barry Burn. It used to really bother me,” says Lawrie. “But I’m over that now—I think.”

So, publicly at least, Lawrie has given up the battle for the hearts and minds of Van de Velde’s vast legion of sympathizers. Which is probably for the best. Given the direction his career has been headed the last couple of years—down—he would be better employed focusing on his game. In at least one respect, he is back where he started.

With his five-year exemption into the other major championships well past its sell-by date and an ultimately abortive attempt to assimilate into life on the PGA Tour long over, the now 38-year-old from Aberdeen, the “Granite City” on Scotland’s northeast coast, will make the one-hour drive south to Carnoustie for this month’s Open ranked well outside the world’s top 100 players— just as he did and was back in 1999.

Materially, things are different this time around for Lawrie and his family, wife Marian and sons Craig (12) and Michael (8). From the beautiful home they live in (bought from a former sponsor right after the Open win) to the various and expensive cars they drive, the Lawries exude a quiet affluence the head of the household can only have dreamed of when, as an impecunious 17-year-old with a handicap of 5, he turned pro on April 1, 1986.

Before that Lawrie was an avid footballer as a child, only discovering golf in his midteens. Once he did, though, there was time for little else in his life. The enviably crisp short game that gives him his nickname on tour, “Chippie,” was honed lobbing ball after ball into the gravel-filled circle beneath the rotating clothesline—a “whirlie” in local parlance—on which his mother hung the family laundry to dry. And the swing that would win a major championship was grooved hitting shots into the overgrown field behind the Lawrie abode.

Ironically, that field is today a driving range, part of the Pine Lodge Golf Centre, although Lawrie’s boyhood home remains untouched—as does the whirlie—just off to the right of the practice bays.

“Before we opened, we had to landscape the field that would become the range,” explains owner and professional, Mark Lees. “In doing so we found somewhere in the region of 3,000 balls, all of them hit by Paul.”

Today, Lawrie is still an occasional visitor to what is now the Lees’ place, the walls of the professional’s shop liberally sprinkled with photographs of the man who grew up literally next-door. His presence, both pictorially and physically, is but one example of the many ways in which he has embraced the people of Aberdeen. Among his fellow “loons” (local slang for, well, a local), Lawrie has never been slow to use his celebrity for the common good.

As well as sponsoring the Paul Lawrie Junior Golf Program of coaching sessions and tournaments—“we host between 4,000 and 5,000 kids every summer”—Lawrie puts his own money into an event for young professionals on Scotland’s Tartan Tour and, only months after his Open victory, spent a full day in Aberdeen with one of the two claret jugs he owns, posing for pictures with anyone who wanted one. Hundreds did.

And his fellow citizens have responded in kind. At the Banchory GC where he first worked as a lowly assistant and where he passed all the exams required to be a club pro (on his first day, head pro, the late Doug Smart, introduced Lawrie to a vacuum cleaner with the line: “Meet your new best friend for the next four years”) the 14th hole is named “Paul Lawrie.” Then there is the honorary doctorate he received from the local Robert Gordon University and the honorary memberships he holds at as many as a dozen local golf clubs.

So it is a mutually beneficial relationship, one that Lawrie obviously relishes. Spend even a dreich Caledonian day in his company all over his native city and it is relentlessly obvious how comfortable he is in such familiar surroundings. Recognized everywhere he goes, the five-time European Tour winner has a word and a smile for everyone from the officials at his beloved Aberdeen Football Club (where he is a season ticketholder) to the most anonymous passer-by.

Lawrie, in fact, revels in every interaction with his fellow citizens. A few months ago he stopped for gas at a filling station. One day earlier the last European to win a major championship had been third with two holes to play in the Estoril Open de Portugal—“it was the best ball-striking week of my career, but my putting was awful”—before a disastrous triple bogey-double bogey finish saw him plummet into a tie for 25th place.

As Lawrie was finishing up at his car, the garage owner spotted his famous customer. “Fit a royal cock-up that wiz, mun,” he yelled across the forecourt in the broad and often unintelligible local accent. (“What a mess that was, mate.”) “Fit wir ye daying? That must hay cost ye a few shilling.” (“What were you doing? That must have cost you a bit of cash.”) Lawrie could only laugh. “I can’t get that sort of friendly abuse anywhere other than Aberdeen,” he says. “I was pleased that a stranger felt able to speak to me like that. He clearly knows that I’m just the same as him, a proud Aberdonian.