Adam Scott doesn’t need reminding of the calamities that links golf can conjure but the ghoulish profiteers in the golf writing business like nothing better than dredging up the past.
Of course, the obvious point of reference regarding The Open and catastrophic conclusions for Scott remains the 2012 championship at Royal Lytham where, with the Claret Jug in his grasp, he stumbled and wheezed down the stretch with a quartet of successive bogeys on his closing four holes to lose by a shot to Ernie Els.
Raking over the debris of that disastrous denouement five years ago would have been all very sombre, though, so let’s lighten the mood a tad and go back even further, to 2000, when the amiable Australian made his maiden voyage in the choppy waters of Open Championship golf at St Andrews.
Lytham may be forever seared on the mind but the memories of that experience in the Auld Grey Toun won’t be shifted easily either.
“I had played through all the qualifiers, the first one at Renfrew and then the final qualifier at Leven Links,” the 36-year-old recalled. “I had been a pro about four weeks at the time. I hit a very nervous 4-iron off the first tee at St Andrews and off I went. I think had about 90 yards to the pin and dead fatted my lob wedge into the burn. And that’s the lasting memory of how I started The Open unfortunately. It was a quick learning curve for me.”
Scott remains one of those there or thereabouts men in The Open. He has a third and fifth and a 10th in his last four appearances in the championship. Apart from a share of ninth in April’s Masters, a tournament he won in 2013 to give him some redemption some nine months after that Open collapse at Lytham, Scott has not been particularly enamoured by his recent record in the golfing grand slam events. The unrelenting focus and scrutiny that the Majors stoke up becomes all consuming.
“They have been built up for so long and certainly since Tiger [Woods] started racking up Majors and made it his goal to get to Jack Nicklaus’ record,” said Scott. “Over the last 20 years they have become the talking point of the game. Everyone judges a player’s career around the Major championships.”
As everybody works themselves into a lather about Rory McIlroy’s form while eagerly anticipating the return of the world No 1, Dustin Johnson, after successive missed cuts in his last two tournaments, the thunderous rise of Jon Rahm continues to whip up expectation. In just a year as a pro, the Spaniard has won on both the PGA Tour and the European Tour and barged his way up to eighth in the world rankings.
“He's played almost as good as anyone for the last 12 months,” said Scott. “He has no idea what poor golf is at this point in his life, which is fantastic.”
As Scott knows, though, The Open Championship can quickly bring you down to earth.
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