Mathematics was never this correspondent’s forte. Some may say writing isn’t either. “A caddie could cost £750 a week so if you play 20 odd events, well, you can work that one out for yourselves,” said Andrew McArthur, as the assembled golf writers started counting their fingers with the kind of clumsy, laboured calculations that would have had us banished to the dunce’s corner of the classroom amid hoots of merciless derision. In this game of numbers, the numbers weren’t adding up for McArthur.
The backing he has gained in recent seasons from the Team Scottish Hydro programme, a support system that has been in place since 2011 and has helped to fund the escapades of 12 Scottish European Challenge Tour players and four Ladies European Tour campaigners, has been a hugely valuable asset and has helped him earn promotion back to the main European Tour for the 2016 season.
Even with that sponsorship, though, the expensive rigours of life at the golfing coal face can still be a heavy burden to bear. In this cut-throat sport, where players are constantly gambling on themselves on a week-to-week basis, the books can often make for the kind of grim financial viewing you’d tend to get with a leaf through the accounts at Rangers.
For McArthur, the former Scottish Amateur champion, things began to get a bit concerning in the middle of the 2014 season. A succession of missed cuts, no money coming in and plenty being forked out? Perhaps it was time to call it a day. “I certainly had discussions about that,” admitted the 36-year-old father of two. “My wife, Laura who was pregnant at the time, was getting quite stressed about it and understandably so. I think she said something like ‘you’re just burying your head in the sand here and pretending it’s not happening’. I knew the situation was getting worse and worse. It was costing me £1,000 to £1,500 a week.”
His dad and "biggest fan", Iain, helped him take up a late invitation to the Irish Open and even acted as his caddie to save some money while another last-gasp call-up to the French Open not long after helped to galvanise his year as he started to make some cuts and stem the financial bleeding. He teamed up for the first time with St Andrews caddie, David Meldrum, and the alliance would eventually become quite profitable.
“I was first reserve, we drove to Paris and I eventually got in the field with about 50 minutes to the tee-off when Paul McGinley withdrew,” recalled McArthur. “I managed to play half decently and was 15th after round two but ended up finishing down the field. We had this long drive back home from Paris and every so often Dave would say ‘if you keep playing like that you’re going to win, you’re going to win’. I had had no confidence, but when you get somebody sitting next to you in car for seven hours telling you you’re going to win it changes. Two weeks later I won on the Challenge Tour in Slovakia.”
Having been given a leg-up by the Team Scottish Hydro scheme, McArthur, who earned promotion back to the main European circuit by finishing 12th on this season’s Challenge Tour rankings, believes he will be far better equipped for frontline duty this time.
"You could perhaps call it maturity but I look it more as an understanding of where I'm at,” he said. “In 2010, I felt I had to make a distinct improvement to be successful and ended up costing myself daft shots all the time due to taking on silly shots. This year, I've played in main tour events and felt much more relaxed because I wasn't trying to do anything I wasn't capable of.
“I'm not going to try and be Rory McIlroy or Tiger Woods. Some weeks my game will be good enough, some weeks it won't. I'm not saying I'm at their standard by any means but look at the likes of Jimmy Walker, Jason Dufner, Miguel Angel Jimenez and Mark O'Meara? They've all blossomed late in their careers.
"I'm still young in golfing terms … but I'm getting fat. After that bad start in 2014, I stopped going to the gym and the fatter I got the better I played.”
Now, is there not another well-kent Scottish golfer who swears by that mantra?
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