RETURN OF THE LAIRD

Martin Laird was 15 years old and sitting with his father in the grandstand behind the 17th green at Turnberry. This was the Open Championship of 1994, the last time the tournament was played on the Ailsa course, and Nick Price was over a 50-foot putt that he had to hole to have a shot at the title. In the time it took the Zimbabwean's putt to wind its way into the hole, a memory was burned into the brain of a young golfer. Laird never got to play Turn-berras he progressed and grew, as his youth and amateur achievements led to a scholarship that took him away from the wind-licked links of Scotland for good. The summer before Price's victory in Ayrshire, Laird played his one and only round at Loch Lomond, in a Faldo Junior Series event that ended unhappily. "I think I shot 80," he recalls. So his is an unusually unfamiliar homecoming. Laird returns this week to play his first tournaments as a pro not just in Scotland but on the European Tour. On Thursday, Loch Lomond provides a lush welcome at the Barclays Scottish Open. The following week, Laird plays The Open for the first time and on the same Ailsa course he witnessed Price's putt. Laird is from Glasgow, he lives in Arizona, but won his spot in a qualifier in Dallas, Texas. "It was a huge deal for me, one of the biggest days in my Golf career," says Laird of his route to The Open. "This is one of the biggest tournaments in Golf and it is the one I've always wanted to play in, the one I watched when I was growing up. So I was extreme-lhappy when I qualified. "Pretty much everyone I know will be at Loch Lomond or Turnberry. That's kind of different for me. On the PGA Tour I play in front of about four or five people that I know. It'll be different to have a big crowd behind me." The Loch Lomond tournament does not breed Open contenders. Compare its forgiving parkland to the dunescapes that challenge the world's best to adapt or perish a week later and that is hardly surprising. Yet Laird is grateful for the softer landing promised at the Scot-tish Open before a return to the coastal challenges he grew up with. "It's a US-style Golf course and that makes it easier for me, I won't have to change my game. As for preparation for The Open, it's more about getting competition the week before. Maybe we'd be better playing links Golf, but the competitive element is the thing for us." The competitive element is what fires Laird. The landmarks of his young career have come in clutch situations, when everything has been on the line; that qualifier in Dallas; Q-school for the Nationwide Tour, when he burst through a pack of gnarly pros in his first year out of college; his fight through the Nationwide rankings in 2007, finishing 13th to earn his PGA Tour card; finally, the nervebending brawl he went through to keep it. Every time he mentions that card, Laird gives the impression that it would be the first thing he located in a house fire. He recalls the final event on the secondary Nationwide Tour in 2007, in San Diego, when PGA officials distributed cards to the top 25 finishers, as the highlight of his career. "Ever since I was a kid, watching the PGA [Tour] on television on Sunday nights, that is what I wanted," he says. "That's the one that dazzled me, playing with the guys I had watched and idolised." The prestige of that card, his place in US Golf's big show and perhaps the $850,000 he made there last year is also the reason Laird will not consider the European Tour as a full-time alternative to his current schedule. And so last year, going into July in a pitifully low position on the money list, the rookie's fear of failure was becoming allconsuming. There was no trip home on the horizon, no invitation to Loch Lomond and no spot at The Open to look for-warto. Only the prospect of a humiliatingly early return to the second tier Nationwide Tour. "I was in panic mode," he recalls. "I was starting to believe I was going to lose my tour card and I really had no confidence. "The week of the Scottish Open was when it happened for me last year. I had missed a bunch of cuts and that week I made one at the John Deere Classic [Laird finished tied for 29th, for $27,900, by far the best result of his season to that point]. That was the first time I had felt that maybe I am good enough to play with these guys. After that I made 13 of the following 14 cuts. My confidence was growing every week. I made three top 10s in a row and my putter got hot." That August hat-trick, fourth places at the Reno-TahoOpen and the Wyndham Championship and a seventh at The Barclays, in New Jersey, made him over $500,000, gave him a shot at retaining his card and bolstered his belief in his place among the elite. The wealth of the PGA Tour is illustrated by how it ended. Despite making all that money, Laird was outside the top 125 earners, the break-off point for an invitation to the following year's tour. His fate was decided in a bloody battle with a handful of other pros around the 125 mark at the Children's Miracle Network Classic at the Disney resort in Florida. "It came down to an eightfooter on the last, and even then I had a nervous couple of hours in the clubhouse to make sure," says Laird. The 26-year-old made it, finished 125th on the tour and is back this year. He remembers the name of No 126, Shane Bertsch, who has not played since. He respects that slender margin between a rich success and a devastating failure and he is in need of another hot streak if he is to keep that precious card. "I know I can get hot for a few weeks," he says. "It's good to have that experience. A lot of guys in my position would panic but you can't try too hard. You have to free yourself up and not worry about the consequences." And this year, there is a break in the grind. A brief homecoming tour, a return to a course where his imagination for the game was fired. And first, to Loch Lomond, and a chance to reintroduce himself to those he left behind. ON TV THURSDAY Barclays Scottish Open 10am Sky Sports 2 World'best head for the Bonnie Banks HOLE YARDS PAR 1 425 4 2 455 4 3 518 5 4 385 4 5 190 3 6 625 5 7 440 4 8 160 3 9 340 4 Out 3,438 36 HOLE YARDS PAR 10 455 4 11 235 3 12 415 4 13 560 5 14 371 4 15 415 4 16 490 4 17 215 3 18 455 4 In 3,611 35 Total 7,149 71 THE CURSE OF LOCH LOMOND No Scottish Open winner since 2000 has finished better than fifth after moving from parkland to the links Golf of The Open. Year Scottish Open winner Open finish 2008 Graeme McDowell Tied 15th 2007 Gregory Havret Missed the cut 2006 Johan Edfors Missed the cut 2005 Tim Clark Tied 17th 2004 Thomas Levet Tied 5th 2003 Ernie Els Tied 18th 2002 Eduardo Romero Missed the cut 2001 Retief Goosen Tied 13th 2000 Ernie Els Tied 2nd THE FRAT PACK Laird is one of several British golfers who have come through the American collegiate system COLIN MONTGOMERIE Monty, right, was something of a pioneer when he chose to earn his spurs in college Golf, at Houston Baptist University where he studied business management and law LUKE DONALD Took up a scholarship at Northwestern University in 1997 after failing to get into Stanford, Tiger Woods' alma mater. Two years later he won the NCAA championship, breaking Tiger's scoring record PAUL CASEY Attended Arizona State, where he became the first collegiate golfer to win three consecutive Pacific-10 titles, contested between the top 10 universities in the region. He broke another of Woods' records by carding a 23-under-par total in 2000 GRAEME McDOWELL The winner of last year's Barclays Scottish Open won the Haskins Award for the outstanding college golfer in the US in 2002, while he was on a scholarship at the University of Alabama CALLUM MACAULAY Macaulay was the outstanding Scottish amateur last year, the national champion and a member of the team that won the Eisenhower Trophy. The former University of Mississippi student is on his rookie year on the European Tour and will tee off at Loch Lomond on Thursday