In this week’s Player Blog presented by Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Scotland’s Paul Lawrie reflects on his Open Championship victory 20 years ago and looks ahead to life on the over-50s circuit as he makes his Senior Open Championship Presented by Rolex debut this week.
The biggest thing I remember from winning The Open? It was bedlam. There are people everywhere, there are reporters everywhere, TV crews outside your door. We lived in a cul-de-sac at the time, and the amount of people who come up to your door just to say ‘well done’ is great. It’s like with Shane now, people just want to come up to you and shake your hand – I still get it to this day, people want to shake the hand of an Open Champion. It’s humbling to know you have won an event with such history, I remember going home with the Claret Jug to have just five minutes with it, looking at the names who’ve won it is scary. Shane will be the same as me, you just go, ‘man, that’s my name on that’.
When I got home that night, I plunked the jug on the side of the telly and sat back and watched the play-off with my wife, and a beer. We only lived an hour from Carnoustie at the time, and Marian was at home the whole time looking after the boys – Craig was four and Michael was only six months old. As a result, she wasn’t at The Open at all that week, as obviously we had a six-month-old to look after! Going back to sit with her and have a drink and talk about what I had done, those are the moments you dream of. Marian has always done so much for me – she’s been so brilliant, so involved and so organised and hardworking, so to take the trophy home to her was amazing and scary at the same time.
I didn’t really drink a lot back then, so my celebrations were a bit different to Shane’s! We had young boys, so Marian and I didn’t really go to the pub, but when you see pictures of Shane celebrating part of you wishes you had done things differently. He’s not only celebrating with his family and friends, but he’s celebrating what he’s done with the whole of Ireland and I didn’t really do that. I was speaking to Sir Alex Ferguson about it at a dinner when he said, ‘you must have had some party, son.’ But after I told him, ‘I just had a beer with my wife in front of the TV,’ and he said, ‘Oh no, you must really celebrate success. We always did that at Man United.’ I do wish I’d done a wee bit more of that. Every time I see someone winning something big, like Shane last week, I do wish that I’d perhaps have done things differently.
I really, really struggled after I won The Open – I suffered from depression. It seemed like every magazine and paper I picked up had the picture of Jean up to his knees in the Barry Burn and people didn’t realise how it hurt me when they said, ‘aren’t you the guy who won The Open when van de Velde had a meltdown?’ Even yesterday there was a guy who was asking me to sign his programme when someone next to him asked me, ‘didn’t you win The Open when van de Velde threw it away?’ I can see why that is now, but I couldn’t understand it at the time, and it took me a long time to learn how to deal with it. Now I look back and wish people would see it as, ‘yes I got lucky, yes I got an opportunity, but plenty of people get an opportunity and don’t take it.’ Richard Cox – who was my psychologist at the time – did a fantastic job as I’ll admit I’m not the best mentally. I often get quite down, and I think that if I’d had a better head I would have won more. He and Adam got me to a place where I could win a Major, and I don’t think they get enough credit for that, so I feel as though when I don’t get credit for what I did they don’t get credit either. For a while that really got to me, and it was a very sad and horrible time in life.
The honest answer is I wish I’d been given more credit. I just wish they’d written how van de Velde had a disaster while I took my opportunity, but I didn’t read that from anyone. It’s up to them as I can’t control what they write and I don’t want to moan, but I honestly wish I’d been given more credit for what I achieved. I was under immense pressure, I was born just an hour from Carnoustie, and I had the whole crowd pulling for me. You can’t control your body when you’re under that kind of stress, and I hit some unbelievable shots under the most intense pressure. I thought I could change people’s opinions for a while, and people would say ‘shut up Lawrie you’ve got the jug’ which is fair enough, but as much as some people don’t want it to be my name on the jug it still is.
I had a funny moment on Twitter recently. I had someone say to me, ‘you only won The Open because the weather was nasty’ and I replied, ‘I can’t see Mr Wind or Mr Rain on the jug, it says Paul Lawrie, so you’ll have to ask the R&A for a new jug with wind or rain on it!’ That seemed to go down quite well with a lot of people, because after a while you just say, ‘I’ve had enough of this’.
At a dinner we had recently I sold my four iron from 1999 for charity. It was sitting in my house and quite a few people liked to pick it up and swing it when they were over, so we thought it was a good time to auction it off at the Paul Lawrie Invitational a few weeks ago. The money went to my Foundation, the Doddie Weir Foundation and the Beatson Cancer Centre in Glasgow, which looked after my friend and coach Adam Hunter before he passed away from Leukaemia. The guy who bought it, Steve Boyle, knew Adam so well and was also coached by him, so I couldn’t really wish for it to go to someone better. He paid £13,500 for it and he even messaged me the next day to ask if I was okay with selling it. I’m thrilled that he has it and that we have been able to raise the money for the three charities.
I think The Ryder Cup in 2012 helped changed my public perception. I think that made a lot of people say, ‘maybe The Open wasn’t a fluke as he’s got his name back in the 12 best players in Europe.’ I think I qualified third for that team, and that really came after Adam having a word with me after I’d worked for Sky during The Ryder Cup in 2010. He was ill in hospital at the time and when I went to see him he had a real go at me, saying that I should have been playing, and that I’d let myself go and I was in a hell of a state and I’d given up. He was lying there with tubes coming out of him, dying from Leukaemia and he ripped me to bits for ten minutes. I came out of there and sat there in the car for 20 minutes crying my eyes out. He was lying there dying from this disease and he wanted to make sure I didn’t just give up. I got back in the team because of that, I started at 400 in the world and rose to 21st in the world to get into the team, and when I look back at that I am really proud. Adam passed away before I played in The Ryder Cup, and I wouldn’t have been there without him.
Senior golf is my focus now for the rest of this year. My surgeon said it may take me up to 12 months to get fully back to normal, so I am more likely to be playing over-50s golf for the rest of this season. I haven’t been in contention for a while, so to be up at the top of the leaderboard this weekend would really be something. Now that I’m 50 the Senior Open is the one that we all want to win, so whether it’s this year, the year after or years down the line it would be really special to lift this famous trophy.
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