Braveheart

Former CSU standout Martin Laird is the only Scot playing full-time on the PGA Tour. As reticent as one of the world’s top 50 go

By Tony Dear

You’d think a pale and pasty Scotsman would look and feel a little out of place in a vast, arid desert. The climate and topography would surely be alien to a man more used to cold rain and soft, green hills. But this is Arizona’s Sonoran Desert we’re talking about, and the Scot in question is Martin Laird, so you’ll have to make an exception.

The 28-year-old moved to Scottsdale six years ago and absolutely loves it. Instead of spending December 9th holed up indoors and waiting for a break in the weather that would likely never come, he’s sitting in the excessively well-appointed lounge of the Estanacia Club sipping coffee while the warm winter sun pours in through elegant clubhouse windows. Except for a trip to Scotland for the Holidays, this is where Laird hangs out at this time of year—playing a few holes, practicing a little, but generally just relaxing before the PGA Tour season starts up again.

Of course, between Scotland and Scottsdale, Laird spent four years in Fort Collins pursuing a Marketing degree while racking up some pretty impressive numbers as part of Jamie Bermel’s Colorado State golf team.

Inevitably perhaps, the first question we ask is how on Earth a 17-year-old Bearsden lad ended up at CSU when he’d never been to the States before and was being courted by several colleges in his native UK.

“I took my highers at 16 and did okay,” he says. “I was approached by Glasgow, Strathclyde, Nottingham, and Loughborough Universities, but I’d been conscious of the possibility of getting a golf scholarship in America for a couple of years. When I got an email from Jamie, I was interested straight away.”

Bermel, who had taken Zach Johnson under his wing at Drake University before moving to Iowa State in 1997 then to CSU in 1999, had been checking Laird’s results for a while. “I actually just saw Martin's swing on tape and looked at his scores from his junior career,” he says. “When I eventually got to speak with him on the phone, he seemed very keen to play in the US and further his career after college.”


It still took a very attractive scholarship, however, to convince Laird CSU was the school for him. The son of a hard-working civil engineer who had taught Martin and his two sisters never to take anything for granted, Laird knew his time in America would not be about boozy nights, late mornings, and relaxed afternoons on the golf course with little or no attention paid to his chosen major. He was here to work and earn some solid qualifications, just in case the golf never worked out. “I very seriously considered going to Rice in Houston, because I felt it was very strong academically,” he says. “But Jamie made me such a great offer.”


Laird arrived in Colorado in the fall of 2000, but admits he took a while to settle. “I played absolutely terribly that first fall season,” he says. “I was very uncomfortable on and off the course, and just not able to concentrate fully on my game. Plus, I hit the ball far too low for American courses. In Scotland you need to hit it low to keep it under the wind, but that shot didn’t work well here.”

Bermel wasn’t shy in telling the freshman exactly how he felt. Laird had had a fairly miserable first few months on the team, and when he failed to perform in Hawaii at the first event of the spring season, the coach felt the time was right to sit him down and give it to him straight. “I brought him into my office and told him I was very disappointed with his play, and that he needed to get things turned around,” Bermel remembers. 


Conscious that his place on the team was in jeopardy and that he wasn’t even close to justifying the faith that Bermel had shown him, Laird began knuckling down and showing the sort of commitment he is slowly gaining a reputation for on the PGA Tour.

“Martin began working very hard on his game,” says Bermel. “I helped a little with his swing, but he had a camera and did a lot of work on his own. He was very driven. I gave advice when I thought it was appropriate, but he came over with a very good understanding of his game and what it took to be successful. I don’t think he finished outside the top ten the rest of the spring.”


Laird quickly learned to hit the ball higher and, in his sophomore year, captured the Mountain West Conference title at Sunriver in Oregon winning with a four-under-par total of 212. He was named to the all-Conference team, which also included the MWC’s Freshman of the Year, Ryan Moore. The following year, he was again named to the all-Conference team which, besides Moore, included current PGA Tour players Daniel Summerhays of BYU and New Mexico’s Michael Letzig who beat Laird in a playoff at the MWC Championship.

“I think one of my best memories of Martin’s college career comes from that tournament,” says Bermel. “He was six-under-par going to the 16th hole, a Par 5, in the first round. The carry over the creek was about 300 yards, or you could lay up with a 2-iron. He said ‘Coach, go over the creek and watch because I'm going for it.’ He made it and birdied the hole. Not a lot of kids would have had the confidence, let alone ability, to go for that shot and pull it off.”


Following his junior year, Laird became CSU golf’s first ever All-American (Honorable Mention), and a year later, after recording an incredible ten top-ten finishes, he was named a 3rd team All-American. During his time at CSU, the three-time MWC all-Conference team member recorded a total of 23 top-ten finishes and 31 top 20s—both school records. His 70.25 scoring average during his senior year was also a school-best, as were his four career victories. 


But it wasn’t just on the golf course where Laird made a name for himself. Eager to satisfy his parents he wasn’t just wasting his time in America playing golf, Laird excelled in the classroom too, becoming a two-time Academic All-American.

He turned professional shortly after leaving Fort Collins and played on the Gateway Tour and wherever else he could find a spot in the field. He made a pretty good start to his new career too, winning the second tournament he entered—the 2004 Denver Open at Buffalo Run. At the PGA Tour’s QSchool in December, his T-96 put his foot in the door of the Nationwide Tour.

For the next three seasons he bounced between the Nationwide and Gateway tours, finishing the 2007 season 13th on the Nationwide money list with just over $252,000, good enough for a ticket to the big leagues. 

Laird made a very creditable 20 cuts from 29 events in his first full season on the PGA Tour and finished 67th in the FedEx Cup standings. A mediocre Fall Series dropped him to 125th on the money list by season’s end with $852,752— just $11,504 ahead of Denver’s Shane Bertsch. But he had retained his card—no small feat for a rookie.

Something went horribly wrong at the start of 2009, however. After making just one cut in his first nine starts, Laird knew the time had come to stop working alone with his camera, and enlist the help of a swing coach. At the Zurich Classic of New Orleans in April, he asked South African Mark McCann, out of sheer desperation, if he might take a look at his swing— not because you have to be desperate to hire McCann, but because Laird would have asked Charles Barkley for a lesson at that particular moment. “I needed to make changes and get some help badly,” he recalls. “My caddie, Alan Bond, knew Mark well and we saw him on the range during one of the practice days. I asked him what he thought.”


Laird had spent the winter prior to coming out at the start of ’09 trying to refine his swing. But instead of perfecting his natural fade, he wound up coming over the top with a closed clubface and hitting some serious pulls and pull-draws—shots that saw him miss cuts by six shots or more and fail to break 70 in 14 consecutive rounds. “I honestly saw no way out of it,” he says, cringing at the memory. “I felt I was going to struggle all year.”


Laird had become way too technical. But in McCann, who also works with Tim Herron and Vaughn Taylor, he found a teacher that worked not on technique with the help of video and other training aids but who tried to instill a certain feel for the swing Laird needed to make.

“Mark definitely has more of a feel approach,” says Laird. “What he got me working on was totally different to what I had been doing, and right away I could feel my confidence returning.”


Laird finished tied for 24th in New Orleans after being joint seventh at one point in the final round. The finish was a bit disappointing, but, he says, “now I could look forward to the rest of the season.”

Three months later, he tied for second in Reno-Tahoe and three weeks after that, scored his first PGA Tour win, beating George McNeil and Chad Campbell in a playoff at the Justin Timberlake Shriners Hospitals for Children Open in Las Vegas. It helped him finish 2009 65th on the money list with $1,349,354.

In 2010, the curve in his ball-striking continued trending upwards, but Laird felt there was still a piece of the puzzle missing. With the focus now off his long game, he became increasingly concerned with his putting so, shortly before August’s WGC Bridgestone Invitational at Firestone Country Club he contacted Dave Stockton Jr. whose methods and expertise were becoming highly sought after.

“It was clear to me why Martin had become a little inconsistent on the greens,” says Stockton. “Like a lot of players, he drew a line on his ball that he used for alignment. He was so dependent on that line and so fixated with the line of the putt, he had become very technical and lost all sense for the speed of the putt.”

Stockton wanted Laird to rely more on his natural feel. To demonstrate the danger of thinking too much about what should be semi-conscious actions, Stockton instructed Laird to sign his name and then told him to do it again, but this time take 15 seconds doing it. When he had to think about what he was doing and became more aware of the movement of the pen, Laird was unable to reproduce the perfect signature.

“I wanted Martin to putt like how he signs his name,” says Stockton. “Putting isn’t about trying, it’s about trusting. Martin’s teeth were always clenched over a putt, and you could see the tension in his body. I just told him to let it all go, see the ball going into the hole, and let it happen. My dad always drummed into me the fact that putting wasn’t an exact science. But it had become that for Martin. Watch him now and you can see how comfortable he looks on the greens.”
In nine events (including the unofficial CIMB Asia Pacific Class in Malaysia) following that initial putting class in Akron, Laird didn’t miss a cut and had five top-25 finishes. He broke through the $2million barrier for the first time and finished the regular season 11th in the FedEx Cup. He was 35th on the final money list having lost playoffs at both the Barclays—one of the four FedEx Cup playoff events, to Matt Kuchar—and Justin Timberlake's Las Vegas event, where he fell victim to a hole-in-one at the fourth extra hole by Jonathan Byrd.

Surprisingly, he wasn’t that upset. “I expected to be a lot more gutted actually,” he says. “But I really wasn’t too crushed about either defeat. I’d forgotten about them and moved on by the following week. Obviously there wasn’t a lot I could do about Jonathan’s hole-in-one in Vegas. He just hit a brilliant shot.”

Equally remarkable as Laird’s c’est-la-vie attitude perhaps is the fact that if you asked your golfing buddies who the common denominator was at those two playoffs, very few of them would know it was Laird. But that’s just the way he likes it. 

 

Laird cares not a jot how much media exposure he does or doesn’t get and would much rather let his clubs do all his talking. “I’m the complete opposite of someone like Ian Poulter,” he says. “Ian is a great player and obviously has no problem talking himself up. It’s what works for him. But I could never do that. I don’t really feel comfortable talking about myself or trying to convince myself I’m better than I actually am.”


 

One person who’s happy to speak on Laird’s behalf is Sir Nick Faldo with whom he played the first two rounds of the Open Championship at St Andrews last year. Both men succumbed to the howling wind and rain on the Friday and missed the cut by some distance. But Faldo, who had also observed Laird from the Golf Channel and CBS commentary booths over the previous year or two, certainly was impressed.

“Martin is a rising young star who is beginning to show his real potential,” says the six-time major champion. “He gained a lot of great experience the hard way in getting so close to winning at the Barclay's last season. More and more he is becoming aware what he is capable of, and his experience at or near the top of several leaderboards will only benefit him going forward and as he continues to rise up the world rankings.”


Laird finished 2010 50th in the world and, following a tie for third in Phoenix in February, climbed to No. 41. As a top-50 golfer, and because he played the Tour Championship in Atlanta last year as one of the PGA Tour’s top 30 money earners, Laird will play all this year’s WGC events and the four majors beginning, in a few short weeks, with his first trip to the Masters.

“Obviously, I am extremely excited about going to Augusta,” he says. “I’ll aim to arrive a few days early and hopefully get in a practice round with Sandy Lyle, who was always my hero growing up.”


But while thoughts of the Masters may be taking up much of his conscious mind right now, the prospect of a far more distant event is slowly building a presence. Laird would dearly love to play in the 2014 Ryder Cup at Gleneagles, and says he would definitely go back to Europe for a while if he needed points to get on the team. “Playing in the Ryder Cup in Scotland would be the pinnacle of my career,” he says.

Though firmly entrenched in Arizona, now enjoying great success on the PGA Tour, and just four months away from getting married to Meagan Franks, daughter of former Haymaker head PGA professional Hank Franks, Laird is still very much a Glasgow boy at heart. “I’m very happily settled in Scottsdale,” he says without the slightest hint of hesitation. “Desert courses aren’t my favorite necessarily, but the facilities are fantastic and I can play 25 events a year and be home in my bed on Sunday night. And I love going back to Colorado with Meagan on the rare occasion we get the chance. But Glasgow is home and always will be.”  


It is becoming increasingly apparent that the softly-spoken but firmly resolute Scotsman is here to stay—in America, and among the world’s top golfers. Echoing Nick Faldo’s words from yesteryear, he says that failure is not an option and that he doesn’t want to look back in twenty years’ time knowing he didn’t give it all he had.