As a means of relieving some of the rapidly building stress, one Scottish golfer was asked if he'd ever pondered colonic irrigation and responded by declaring that he wasn't that keen on gardening.
It’s that time of year when it all becomes a bit tense for those wheezing along in the Race to Dubai and, over the next couple of weeks, some of our hopefuls will emerge smelling of roses. Others will be weeded out and tossed back into the dumping ground of the qualifying school.
Aberdeen’s Richie Ramsay, who has bloomed over the past few weeks with a succession of third place finishes on the main European circuit, has thrust himself into 30th spot on the order of merit as he builds towards a grandstand finish at the big-money bonanza that is December’s Dubai World Championship.
It’s the kind of late season flourish that many of his countryman languishing in the lower reaches of the standings are in desperate need of.
This week in Malaysia and South Africa, the likes of Steven O’Hara, Gary Orr, Lloyd Saltman and Alastair Forsyth are all preparing to give the dice one final hurl in the last chance saloon.
O’Hara, the former Scottish amateur champion, has already made one huge gamble that didn’t pay off. A fortnight ago, he embarked on the expensive trek to the Far East for a qualifying round for last week’s Barclays Singapore Open, managed to scramble through the 18-hole shoot-out, flew back to Scotland and headed back out for the event itself only to miss the halfway cut by just two strokes.
At 133rd on the order of merit, and with the opportunity to compete for a chunk of a $6m prize pot, O’Hara’s ultimately fruitless escapade illustrated perfectly just what players fighting to safeguard their place in the card-retaining top 115 will put themselves through.
His manager, Brian Marchbank, a former European Tour campaigner who was runner-up to Greg Norman in the 1982 English Classic, knows what the current crop are enduring. The Perthshireman’s other client, George Murray, galvanised a season of toil with a third place finish in October’s Alfred Dunhill Links Championship at St Andrews which propelled him into the safety zone.
Now, all eyes are on O’Hara, who is in Malaysia for the Iskandar Johor Open. Given his perilous position, an in-depth study of the money list must be about as enjoyable as reading over an eviction notice.
An expert in all things rankings related, Marchbank estimates that €250,000 at the end of the season will be good enough to hold on to that prized tour card. With earnings so far of €185,122, O’Hara, who finished fourth in the Africa Open in his very first event of the season, has two, possibly three, events left on his schedule to make around €62,000.
“It’s a huge ask and it’s a lot of money to make up with smaller prize funds, but there’s always someone who comes through at this time of year,” said Marchbank. “Now it’s about performing under immense pressure. George [Murray] did it but he did it at the right time and at the right event. He could’ve played just as well at something like the Austrian Open but, because it was the Dunhill Links, with such a huge amount of prize money, it was massive for him.”
Orr, the Helensburgh stalwart whose medical exemption runs out at the end of this year, lurks just behind O’Hara at No 135 but has paid the price for missing 11 of his first 13 cuts at the start of the campaign. In contrast, Saltman, at No 138, has made 16 cuts in 23 events but his stats simply highlight the fact that you have to make the most of the weekends.
It’s impossible to make serious inroads on the order of merit by posting a 31st here and a 62nd there. The time has now arrived for that big result to be pulled out of the hat.
AND ANOTHER THING
Stewart Regan, the chief executive of the Scottish Football Association, managed to get his radical restructuring proposals for the national game pushed through with a unanimous thumbs up at an agm in June.
Just a few weeks earlier, the bid to amalgamate the Scottish Golf Union and the Scottish Ladies Golfing Association was thrown out.
Regan was drafted in as a guest ‘external facilitator’ by the SGU recently as the process of getting the act of union back on track resumed.
If he can get the stodgy old SFA to revamp 138 years of history, then hopefully, his open, independent outlook has helped knock a few stubborn heads together in the domestic amateur golf scene.
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