With four consecutive Open wins to his name by the age of just 21 back in 1872, Young Tom Morris was something of a sporting superstar. These days, you can just about achieve superstar status by uploading a video of a cat breaking wind on to YouTube.
Reality TV, internet or whatever may be the current craze but when it comes to golf, reality is often the one club we forget to put in the bag.
Scotland is renowned as the cradle of the game but in the vast global pool of players trying to make it to the top in the professional game, success is by no means a birth right. While the upper echelons of the men’s world rankings are awash with supremely talented 20-somethings, and the women’s game is led by 18-year-old Lydia Ko, there is a tendency to demand that our own new recruits to the pro scene make the kind of explosive impact you’d get with a few sticks of dynamite. Of course, just getting a foothold on to the main tours, managing to stay there and making a decent living for yourself is a considerable achievement in itself given the depth of talent coming from every nook and crannie of the golfing globe.
“We are still a small country and the top of golf is a huge place,” said Steve Paulding, the performance manager with Scottish Golf, the amateur game’s merged governing body. “If we think we are going to get any more than one or two players every 10 years or so taking over the mantle where they are right up there then we are deluding ourselves. You have to be somebody really special to do it. It might take them four or five years just to break through. We spend our time comparing our players against the outliers, the likes of Rory McIlroy or Lydia Ko. Paul Lawrie is an outlier. These people have got to where they are because they are out of the norm. You can’t build development programmes around them, you build around the majority of people. These outliers would make it anyway. Most people’s journey is four or five years and most don’t make it.
“We have players with great ability and not the right work ethic and we have some with not the same ability but a great work ethic. If we can marry that up we could get our next superstar but there is no fast track in sport.”
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