Martin Laird marked his professional debut in Scotland with a six-under-par 65 in the first round of the Barclays Scottish Open and rated his performance in benign conditions over the Loch Lomond layout as the most fun he has had on a golf course in a long time.

Martin Laird marked his professional debut in Scotland with a six-under-par 65 in the first round of the Barclays Scottish Open and rated his performance in benign conditions over the Loch Lomond layout as the most fun he has had on a golf course in a long time.

He was best of the 14 Scots in the field and ended the day in joint second place, one behind Richard Green, the Australian left-hander who was third here last year.

Laird, a 26-year-old exile who is based in Arizona and is the only Scot for two decades to be playing the PGA Tour, justified his invitation with a bogey-free round that included two chips-in, ended with back-to-back birdies and was played in front of his own small army of friends and relatives.

"It's a dream start," said Laird, who had previously visited the lochside venue only as a spectator in his junior days at the nearby Hilton Park club which afforded him honorary membership last year.

"I talked about how my short game needed to be sharp this week to have a chance and it was as good as it has been all year."

He agreed there was a release from the routine pressure he faces in the US on the PGA Tour where he is down at No.181 on the money list and well short of the 125 who retain their playing rights. Unlike the Open at Turnberry next week, earnings at the Scottish Open count only for the European Tour, of which he is not a member.

"I've not had one thought this week that I need to play well to help my position in the PGA Tour money list or the FedEx Cup. I'm trying to treat this like every tournament but by not having those thoughts then maybe you are right," he said.

Even so, the sense of homecoming gave him a rush of nerves on the 10th tee where he began his round, but he quickly settled thanks to a chip-in for a 2 at the 235-yard 11th, and he did likewise with a flop shot from the left of the green at the 16th for a 3 having also birdied the 371-yard 14th.

Driving well with his favoured high fade, the only negative in his round was some wayward iron play. At the 518-yard par-5 third he needed only an iron for his second, pushed it wide of the green, but from thick rough played a long pitch exquisitely to tap-in distance.

He capped his round by holing from 30 feet for 2 at the short eighth in front of Rossdhu House and then a 10-foot downhiller at the ninth. "Nothing," he remarked, "is better than those rounds where you feel like you're not playing as good as you can and you still get a good score.

"I got lucky today. Hopefully I can sharpen up my iron game and I'll be in an even better position on Sunday."

Laird is staying this week with girlfriend Megan in a lodge at neighbouring Cameron House. He has been joined by his parents who live in Fife and is enjoying his mum Anne's home cooking. "They are going to be here all week now so it's nice and relaxing," he admitted.

Green, 38, a product of the highly-regarded Victoria Institute of Sport and a two-time winner on the European Tour, said he had spent 90 minutes on the range on Wednesday after a dreadful performance in the pro-am.

"The pro-am form was a surprise because I had been playing well for three weeks. Fortunately I seemed to hit the nail on the head pretty quickly," he said, and the result was a round including six birdies, a solitary bogey at the 12th followed immediately by an eagle 3 courtesy of a 35-foot putt which he estimated had eight feet of break.

Green is the world No.90 and reckons he should have won more in his 13 years on tour than he has done.

"A lot of opportunities have presented themselves to me but I haven't handled the pressure quite as well as I would have liked to, but you know the more I put myself in there the more and more I feel like I can do it," he said.

Joining Laird in second place were the Englishman Graeme Storm, the Spaniard Gonzalo Fernandez-Castano, and the Irish Ryder Cup player Paul McGinley, whose score was the best of the afternoon starters when the light winds of the morning strengthened and the greens became bumpy.

The 42-year-old was third here in 2001, a performance that he remembers with great pleasure and as a result always has what he calls a "feelgood factor" on his visits to Scotland. "I had a big finish and that put me on the cusp of making my first Ryder Cup team," he recalled. "I'm familiar with Scotland and I come up here a lot. It's nice to check in to the same hotel every year, go to the same restaurants and I get a lot of support . . . well, from half the population here anyway."

While fellow Dubliner Padraig Harrington has preferred to stay at home this week to play the Irish PGA on links to prepare for his attempt at three consecutive Open Championship wins at Turnberry next week, McGinley finds the attraction of this tournament irresistible.

"The Irish PGA would have been perfect for me except it comes up against a tournament of this size which I can't afford to miss and at a course I'm familiar with and enjoy," he said.

He was coy about his prospects of captaining Europe's Ryder Cup team when the biennial bunfight comes to Gleneagles in 2014. "If the opinion is still strongly that we need to have a current player involved a lot will depend on how I play over the next four or five years. It's so far down the road at this time," he said.

There were 78 players, exactly half the field, who beat the par of 71 yesterday and a measure of what is possible if conditions remain so kindly was provided by Italian Francesco Molinari who played his opening nine holes starting at the 10th in three-over 38 and returned in seven-under 29 with a run of seven birdies and two pars.

Surely the magical 60 barrier couldn't be broken today?