Professional golf isn’t what you’d call the 9 to 5 routine. Then again, the increasingly ponderous pace of play on the circuits these days is just about threatening to turn tournament rounds into back-breaking, eight-hour shifts.
For Ross Kellett, the structure and security of Monday to Friday employment is a far cry from the golfing globetrotting that would have had Phileas Fogg gasping for a breather, but the Motherwell man couldn’t be happier.
Golf will always be his passion but it’s not his day job now after the stresses, strains, frustrations and fluctuating fortunes of this fiercely fickle game eventually took a toll. “The night before I started my new job I slept better than I had for months,” admitted Kellett who has taken up a sales post with quarrying and waste recycling firm, Blue Group, who were one of his long-term sponsors during his touring days.
Those days are now over. Kellett knew it was coming at the tail end of 2018 but he made his announcement to all and sundry just last weekend.
❤️🏌🏻♂️ pic.twitter.com/LWWjT7s6rA
— Ross Kellett (@golferRK) March 3, 2019
A winner on the third-tier Alps Tour in his rookie season of 2012, Kellett, always open, honest, engaging and hard-working, chiselled away on the European Challenge Tour in the years that followed. The coalface can be a tough old place, though.
“The poor golf I played made me feel horrendous,” he said. “I just wanted to be swallowed up every time I hit a bad shot. It made me feel worse than a bad day at the office should. When it makes you feel like that, then you have to ask yourself if you’re doing the right thing.
“I wouldn’t say it was ever depression, but it was certainly a low mood which was affecting how I was feeling off the course. In the evenings when I was with pals at dinner at a tournament I wasn’t really engaging with them. I wasn’t speaking to my mum and dad as much when I was home either. When it gets to that stage and it’s not beneficial to my health and to those around me, then you have a decision to make.
“Don’t get me wrong, golf is an amazing life but it’s not all rosy. You are always trying to meet your expectations, you work hard and over the years it can grind you down. I had 75 flights last year, you’re dragging bags through airports and when things are not going well you get a bit disheartened. Did I want to keep putting myself through that?
The answer was ‘no’.”
Kellett played for Scotland and GB&I as an amateur. As a pro he tasted the winning feeling while coming within a birdie putt of a golfing holy grail of a 59 on the Challenge Tour in 2016.
“I’ll leave it with no regrets,” he said. “I’ve not done massive things in the game but I’m proud of what I’ve achieved. It’s easy to look back and say I could have done this or that. I try and keep ‘should’ and ‘could’ out of my vocabulary, though. You can only do your best.”
“I have a steady income now and can do things I maybe couldn’t have before as golf was holding me back in a sense.
“There are daft little things I’m looking forward to. Being away a lot during the season meant I missed those summer nights playing golf with my mates, the kind you loved when you were a junior. Life is a bit simpler now.”
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