It’s No Longer a Happy Troon

TROON, Scotland —  Colin Montgomerie has always been a difficult guy to get your arms around, and not only because he’s pudgy. It’s his nature.

Montgomerie can be cantankerous, abrupt, chronically moody and often downright unfriendly.

At 41, any chances for personal improvement may appear slim, because Montgomerie looks as if he’s a finished product.

Then again, maybe he isn’t.

There is another side of Montgomerie that he showed last week in the small town on the Ayrshire coast where he grew up.

Montgomerie, who is playing at the British Open here this week, returned unannounced, with no fanfare at all, to visit this very personal place, to try to clear his head, to figure out where he’s come from, what’s happened to him and why he’s back again.

It’s easy to snap a mental photograph of a solitary Montgomerie as he took a walk around the Royal Troon course.

Maybe Montgomerie looked at the office in the building where his father, James, has been club secretary.

Montgomerie’s route took him across the driving range where he had spent so many hours working on a game that would propel him to the top of the Order of Merit for seven consecutive years and the No. 1 ranking in Europe.

This has been Montgomerie’s town for a long time. He moved to Yorkshire, England, and then again to Texas to play golf at Houston Baptist University, but he always returned. On many of those trips here, he visited his mother, Betty, who had lung cancer. She died at 53 in 1991. On another one of those trips, Montgomerie met Eimear Wilson, who lived two doors away. He married her at the Troon Old Parish Church, and the reception, which was a huge social event, was held alongside the 18th fairway of the championship course.

It has been three months since Eimear Wilson Montgomerie parted with her husband; a divorce is pending.

Montgomerie, whose ranking is 71st and who had to qualify to play in his 15th British Open, made the preview trip here to try to remove the emotion from his system.

“It was something I had to do,” Montgomerie said. “I wanted to get those feelings out of the way so I would not have to deal with them.”

And so it is a somewhat softer, reflective Montgomerie who will test his boyhood course, which he has played hundreds of times, and search for something that might put his life back on track.

His golf game appears to be floating around. He has won once in 14 full-field European Tour events, the Caltex Singapore Masters in March. Other than that, he hasn’t finished better than a tie for 13th at the Johnnie Walker Classic in January.

Montgomerie shot 71-80 and missed the cut at the Masters and wasn’t exempt to play in the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills.

This brings us to Royal Troon, for better and worse, the most pivotal place of Montgomerie’s life. Seven years ago, as one of the favorites at the British Open, he shot even-par 284 and tied for 24th.

As for how he will play once he steps on the course for Thursday’s first round, he said he is relaxed. Then he said he isn’t.

“Very relaxed, really ... a little bit of tension on me, but that’s OK,” he said. “I can handle that. And it’s nice to be here, really, I suppose, and I’m going out there with less expectations than I have had in Opens in the past, especially when I came here in 1997.

“Of course, I was No. 1 in Europe and I was one of the favorites to win. This year, I’m not one of the favorites. Who knows? Greece, the underdogs won [in European soccer], so we’ll see how that goes.”

The transformation to underdog has not been especially graceful for Montgomerie, who is learning on the fly, while his public life is open for inspection. Eimear Montgomerie was the subject of a two-page article in a Glasgow newspaper Sunday in which she denied having an affair with actor Hugh Grant. She said she is interested only in raising her three children.

Montgomerie has said all along that his commitment to golf is what doomed his marriage.

At this stage, with his personal life unsettled and his golf on much the same level, Montgomerie isn’t sure whether what he’s going through will hurt or help him when he tackles Royal Troon.

“I think I wouldn’t say I was at a peak, but at the same time, I’m a lot better than I was,” he said. “I think time is a healer and you get on with things, and that’s what I’ve got to do.”

It seldom has been fashionable to root for Montgomerie, but maybe things will be different this year.

For sure, it’s a different figure who will be stomping along the fairways, holding his pose on his irons shots and intently studying the greens. It’s not the Monty of old, at least not on the inside.