'Staring us in face' - this is how to squeeze a bit more out of Scottish talent in golf

The likes of Paul Lawrie and Stephen Gallacher are two obvious inclusions given the success they achieved from different golfing backgrounds and also the fact they both know the Scottish game inside out.

What you might find most interesting about it, though, is that it mainly consists of people who, for one reason or another, either didn’t fulfil their true potential or didn’t get the reward they deserved from a prolonged career.

Take Colin Brooks, for example. The Glencorse player preceded Colin Montgomerie as the Scottish Amateur champion in 1986 at Monifieth and was one of the country’s top professional prospects when I first started covering the game on a full-time basis.

Blond-haired Brooks earned a place in the record books as the first Scot to win on the Challenge Tour - the Tartan Tour event was staged four times on the circuit during its infancy - when landing the Northern Open at Cruden Bay in 1989.

Yet, that success apart, which actually came at a time when he wasn’t even a Challenge Tour member, it just didn’t really happen for him in a total of 21 appearances on the feeder circuit or in his 24 starts on the European Tour.

Brooks turned to coaching and has carved out a successful career in that field, but, having been one of the most-talented Scottish golfers I’ve come across and then lost to the game in a playing sense, he’d be a member of my ‘think tank’.

As would someone like David Drysdale, who, for my money anyway, enjoyed an outstanding career on what is now called the DP World Tour despite the fact it ended without him managing to record a win in 576 appearances.

The Cockburnspath man occupied a seat at the top table for 18 successive seasons and 20 in total, which was a tremendous achievement and even more so on the strength of Drysdale having started his career as a PGA trainee based at Dunbar.

He is one of the most-experienced players we’ve got in this country and is someone we should be tapping into in the bid to ensure that the Saltire - we’ve had four different winners on the DP World Tour this season and two on the HotelPlanner Tour - continues to fly high on leaderboards over the next decade and beyond.

Someone else I’d be keen to include in my brain-picking exercise is Dean Robertson, another player who showed his potential when winning the Scottish Amateur Championship - the Cochrane Castle played claimed the title at Royal Dornoch seven years after Brooks and 12 months after Gallacher - before going on to become a DP World Tour winner as well when being crowned as the Italian Open champion in 1999.

Having made close to 250 DP World Tour appearances before carving out an alternative career in the game as a performance coach at the University of Stirling, Robertson lives and breathes golf to a degree that you’d find hard to match and hats off to The R&A for making the sensible decision to reappoint him as the Great Britain & Ireland captain for next year’s Walker Cup at Lahinch.

Yes, of course, the end result - the US ran out 17-9 winners at Cypress Point - in last month’s contest was disappointing, but it was no surprise to hear that Robertson’s work behind the scenes had been “meticulous” and you can be guaranteed that he will be doing everything in his power to get an improved singles’ return in Ireland because, at the end of the day, that’s been the big difference in the last two editions.

While a string of Stirling scholars have clearly benefitted from Robertson’s experience over the past 15 years and others continue to do so, it’s disappointing, quite frankly, that he’s never been headhunted by Scottish Golf because he clearly has so much to offer and, therefore, should be utilised, and I say this with all due respect to his current employers, in a national role.

Hence why he’d be part of that ‘think tank’ I’ve got in my head and the reason it came to mind was due to someone else being added to it last week after being told by Jack McDonald that he has called time on his career as a tour professional and is going down the PGA training path under David Orr at Whitecraigs Golf Club on the south side of Glasgow.

McDonald was one of our ‘boy wonders’ at the same time as Grant Forrest, for example, was shaping up as a star in the making. Forrest won the Scottish Boys’ Championship at West Kilbride in 2010, the year after McDonald had produced an eye-catching performance when claiming the Scottish Boys’ Stroke-Play Championship at Ladybank at just 16. Coached at the time by Adam Hunter, the Kilmarnock (Barassie) player finished four shots clear of a field that included David Law.

McDonald, who went on to play on the same winning Walker Cup team as both Forrest and Ewen Ferguson at Royal Lytham in 2015, has just enjoyed his best-ever season on the HotelPlanner Tour, finishing in the top ten in two of his last five events, and underlined his class when storming to an impressive seven-shot success in last week’s Tartan Pro Tour season-ending Tour Championship presented by Gym Rental at Trump International Golf Links in Aberdeenshire.

At 32, though, he has decided that he couldn’t go on purely playing the game for a living and fair play to him for that as there are players out there who have made no headway whatsoever in the game yet, remarkably, still find a way to prolong playing careers.

Experience in Scotland is not close to being used in proper manner

McDonald, one of the brightest golfers in the game after gaining an applied mathematics degree at the University of Stirling, is in a different league to some of them in terms of playing ability, yet he is “content” with a decision that will still allow him to play competitively on both the PGA in Scotland Tartan Tour and Paul Lawrie’s Tartan Pro Tour and, by the looks of things, is enjoying his golf again.

In conclusion, at a time when Golf France, for example, has former Scottish Open winner Gregory Havret working as the head of men’s elite golf, Scotland really should be looking to the vast experience staring us in the face but, sadly, is not even close to being utilised in the proper manner.