Liam Johnston doesn’t hang about. The 25-year-old has made such a rapid rise over the last few months, his thunderous upward trajectory almost appears on the mission control monitors at Cape Canaveral.
In nine months, he has gone from plying his trade on the third-tier Pro Golf Tour to all but securing his card for the main European Tour next season with victory in the Challenge Tour’s Kazakhstan Open on Sunday.
“He has smashed his three year goals in just a few months,” said his coach, James Erskine.
Over the last couple of years, the Dumfries golfer has developed into a winner. His final season as an amateur in 2017 was burnished by victories in the Africa Amateur Championship and the Scottish Open Strokeplay Championship.
At the end of that year, he made the plunge into the paid ranks, won the Pro Golf Tour’s Qualifying School and then won on the circuit itself at the start of 2018. In just his third start on the second-tier Challenge Tour, he won again and his latest success at the weekend justified the decision he took a couple of years ago when he was initially mulling over the idea of turning professional.
“He went to the qualifying school as an amateur and never got through but he wanted to turn pro,” recalled Erskine, the Dumfries & County head pro who has been working with Johnston for the past six years.
“I told him, ‘I don’t think you are ready’. I’d never performed on the tour and I didn’t want to give him duff information about what to expect so I called Andy Coltart. Andy re-iterated what I’d said. Not turning pro then was perhaps one of the best things Liam could’ve done.
“He has learned to win at every level he has played on. If he’d made that transition back then, I don’t think he’d be where he is now. When I first started with him, he was doing quite well over at US college but then he just seemed to fall off the planet. But you could see he had massive potential.”
Such has been the pace of Johnston’s progression over the last year, Erskine just about has to deliver his coaching pearls of wisdom from a bicycle just to keep up.
“He had a wee slump after that first Challenge Tour win,” added Erskine. “We had a chat and I tried to put things in perspective. I told him, ‘if someone said nine months ago that you’d have a chance to get a European Tour card having started the year with no status on the Challenge Tour, you’d be over the moon’. We tried to adopt a very positive attitude.
“This is his first year in the trade. It’s still uncharted territory but he learns very quickly. And he’s done it off his own bat. That gives him the burning desire to do well.”
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