Mauritius, South Africa, Dubai, Australia, Oman, Qatar, back to South Africa … the general careering about on the European Tour’s international schedule would have Wish You Were Here stalwart, Judith Chalmers, in a panting, wheezing lather.
“I’ve been on the road for eight weeks and I think I’m ready for a rest,” said Connor Syme, the young Fife rookie after a here, there and everywhere spell on the main circuit.
It’s all part of the day job, of course, and after a run of four successive missed cuts at the start of the campaign, the 22-year-old gave himself a timely tonic with an 11th place finish in the Tshwane Open last weekend.
It’s been an eye-opening and exacting stint for Syme as he tries to gain a foothold on the tour. having earned his card at last November’s qualifying school final. In this game, you are always learning and in the fraught cut-and-thrust of frontline combat, the raw recruits have to learn quickly.
Not everybody, for example, can be a Shubhankar Sharma, the 21-year-old Indian who has won twice on the European circuit this season, and Syme is content to find a way that suits him while feeding off the pearls of wisdom from others.
“People have different ways of doing things,” said the former Walker Cup player, who had a couple of impressive top-15 finishes on the European Tour while playing on invitations at the tail end of the 2017 season. “That’s what I need to find out about myself.
“It’s my first time out here so I need to discover how many weeks in a row I can handle. It’s all new. In hindsight, I may have scheduled things differently. Saying that, though, my best result of that eight week spell arrived in the final event. But you can overdo it.
“I ended up at the doctors in Qatar with swollen glands and lacking energy and that was maybe from having a fairly full-on schedule. Time management is the thing to work on.
“Going back to my amateur days, I always liked to be at the range and working on my game but on the tour, after long flights and things, it’s better just to rest up instead of ploughing into eight hour days and pushing myself at the start of the week,
“I was fortunate to get a bit of time with Justin Rose and he mentioned that. He looks to be at his peak on the Sunday. He doesn’t do as much at the start of the week so that he is in the best shape possible for the final day. That’s what I have to learn to do and I’m just trying to pick the brains of the experienced guys.
“After missing a few cuts, it was good to get the monkey off my back and post a decent result. In this line of work, you don’t enjoy being off at a weekend. You can’t dwell on it, though, and that 11th place finish gives me something to work with and build on.”
Syme won’t get another main tour outing until April’s Spanish Open but there are always opportunities for the intrepid and the Scot will pack his golfing bits and bobs and venture forth again for the second-tier Challenge Tour’s Kenya Open in a couple of weeks.
“The prize fund has gone up in that event to 500,000 euro and it’s now the richest on the Challenge Tour,” he said. “Win that and you are well on your way to securing your card that way too.
“After a decent result you want to keep playing and building the momentum. Kenya is another opportunity and you have to take them all when they come along.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here