The abiding image is of a natural golfer, a player sublimely unconcerned with the demanding technique of this gloriously perverse game, but who is also the very picture of a hunter searching down his prey with the cunning of a lion.
There are some who say that Colin Stuart Montgomerie OBE is so perfectly balanced because he always wears a heart on both sleeves. It is a theory hard to displace because it has ever been thus since the artist - soon to be known universally by the sobriquet Monty - turned professional in 1987. He enjoyed a plus three handicap at the time and had won, amongst other amateur titles, the Scottish Amateur Championship. Right from the start he laid down the template for his new professional life. “My aim,” he said in that intensely authoritative style of his: “Is to make a decent living and to improve each year if I can.”
Well, he did, and he did. Despite his disappointment, an occurrence more revolving on bad luck in not winning – thus far – a Major Championship, he did bestride the 1990s like a colossus. More than this, his personality and his readiness to voice an opinion in a coherent and often entertaining fashion, set him apart from the herd. Monty never just invited you to look at his medals, his seven consecutive European Tour Order of Merit titles, he talked you through them richly and along the way always offered an opinion on those people who failed to offer an opinion.
Too often in this squared and modern world, professional sportsmen feel uncomfortable talking about anything other than themselves. Theirs can be a tiny world, a small and rather monosyllabic planet. A dull place.
Well Monty’s World has never been dull. His life is a perpetual drama waiting to happen. Now, just when some believed the truly great days were over, his game retreating before the inevitable onslaught of age, he has reinvented himself. Or rather rebuilt himself. For it was not the new Monty we witnessed emerging from a turbulent few years in 2005, it was, in fact, the old one.
At the beginning of the season it was depressingly easy to view him as something of a lost soul, a man understandably impaled on the sharp emotions of a very public divorce and a golfer traumatised by his inability to reach out and to consistently touch the old competitive sharpness he had caressed since his teenage years.
He was ranked 83rd in the world and he was not happy. He told us he was determined to return to the top 50 on the Official World Golf Ranking, two score and ten players who, by virtue of their standing, enjoy the sweetest ride through the most coveted tournaments. He told us he could do this and, what is more, he would. But those of us who have ridden with him through so much of his life and his career, the majority clinging on desperately as momentum and mood swung this way and that, felt that more than a place back in the top 50, Monty was searching for an inner peace.
As the curtain came down on 2005, it appeared he had found both. Contentment for Colin Montgomerie has always come ultimately from a job well done and as he contemplated his eighth European Number One title he felt good both inside and out.
It is quite simply a phenomenal achievement. The European scene is alive to the bravado calls of a posse of talented golfers these days, most of them significantly younger than the Scot, and for him to hold them off and then to move forward himself is breathtaking. We should not, of course, be surprised.
As early as January he hoisted his flag of intent via a second place in the Caltex Masters, presented by Carlsberg, Singapore 2005 before, a week later, he finished tied for 11th in the Heineken Classic staged at the classically impressive Royal Melbourne Golf Club. Monty was off but not quite running.
His form continued through the early months with top ten finishes in Dubai, China (twice) and Indonesia. He was clearly in improving fettle but the old, cocky spring was not yet in his stride. He was still searching for The X Factor, that indefinable something which turns the accomplished player into a winner. His mood, though, was increasingly confident. The fact was Monty was testing himself and, for the most part, being reassured with what he found.
Forced, frustratingly, to sit out the Masters Tournament in April, he continued to work on mind and body and his first missed cut of the year did not come until June when he slid out of The Celtic Manor Wales Open. The sceptics immediately began to emerge once more. The old flame, they said, was extinguished forever.
They were, of course, spectacularly wrong but then with Montgomerie, it had never been a mere flame. In his case it had been a roaring bush fire, a volcanic ignition that takes some serious extinguishing. Slowly, despite this setback, he was rekindling some serious heat, a process helped hugely by his qualification for the US Open Championship at Pinehurst No.2 in North Carolina where he finished in a creditable tie for 42nd place.
His second runners-up spot of the year came at the Smurfit European Open in Ireland but it was to be his third second place that finally shifted all his component parts into the correct competitive order. This arrived in the epicentre of his heartland, St Andrews, the Old Course and Scotland.
He had to concede victory in The Open Championship to an irresistible Tiger Woods that weekend in July but his joust with the best golfer in the world caught the public’s imagination and the support extended to him by Scottish fans on that final Sunday offered up the vital last piece of reassurance he had been seeking. To understand this you must first know that while Monty has always been an overtly confident person, he has retained an attractive vulnerability to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. It is this most human of faces that continues to endear him to a public who remain fascinated by his progress through the game.
Sometimes, it must be added, his inability to restrain his emotions and his susceptibility to a rash word or action has caused dismay but, for the most part, he has been man enough to own up to these ill-chosen sentences or deeds and his repentance has been transparently sincere.
Having started his total rehabilitation on the Old Course in July, he completed the process at the same venue 11 weeks later when he won the dunhill links championship. His amateur partner for the week was Hollywood superstar Michael Douglas and the actor was so charmed by his professional that he stayed on long after the prizegiving, just another spectator caught up in the narrative of Monty’s life.
It was after the pair had been photographed together on the Swilcan Bridge (pictured above) that Monty finally allowed us briefly inside the farthest reaches of his head and heart. He admitted he had wondered if his last victory – in Singapore some 19 months earlier - had indeed been just that, his last. “Who was to know?” he said. “You get down, of course you get down, and self-doubt creeps in. Now everything has changed again. This is the most important victory of my life.”
So it has proved. The following week he overcame tiredness and jet-lag to finish tied for third place in the WGC - American Express Championship in San Francisco, a supreme example of will triumphing even if the actual victory went to Woods again. Those two weeks took him above Michael Campbell at the top of The European Tour Order of Merit. Just a couple of months earlier this had seemed the most unlikely of situations, and there he stayed with another superb performance in the season-ending Volvo Masters.
We should, of course, have taken into account not just an outstanding talent but his lifelong ability to bounce back from adversity. After the dunhill links championship, the old Monty was before us once more, the rhythm silkily restored and the familiar pose, whereby he stands with his club sheathed like a hussar about to meet the Queen, was on view again.
His delight at recovering the Harry Vardon Trophy after an absence of six years was obvious for all to see, and second only to his pleasure at now being all but a certainty for The 2006 European Ryder Cup Team and a match he always illuminates. He has never really been away but it is still good to welcome him back to where he so deservedly belongs. Let the fun begin once more.
Bill Elliott
The Observer / Golf Monthly
Reproduced by kind permission of The European Tour Yearbook 2006. To order a copy please e-mail Victoria Harris in The European Tour Communications Department atvharris@europeantour.com
