The day job has changed. After almost two decades of queuing through security at airports, all around the globe, with the engraved PGA European Tour card as his licence to tee it up in far-flung corners where every stroke and every score scribbled onto a signed scorecard determined the outcome and the size of the paycheque, Peter Lawrie has given up that nomadic odyssey for a new role as director of golf at Luttrellstown Castle, a mere five minutes drive from his home.
No more life on tour, no more fighting to keep a card; just as the leaves are turning and drifting downwards on this fine property between Castleknock and Lucan, Lawrie – at 42 years of age – has called it a day as a tour player and already has moved on, accepted change.
There’s a businesslike efficiency about him, just as there was in a career of creditable consistency on tour that garnered one European Tour win - the 2008 Spanish Open - along with a lot more close calls and, probably most importantly, the respect of everyone who came his way.
For the past five years, Lawrie has been on the European Tour tournament committee. The other day he attended another of those meetings intent on handing in his resignation. He was asked not to. He didn’t. Often a voice of reason, cerebral and calm, he’s seen as a strong advocate for those players who are the mainstay of tour life, those 95 per cent of players outside the so-called elite. Journeymen, rookies, hard-workers and all obsessed with the same dream of winning tour titles.
In just over a fortnight’s time, the second stage of the European Tour qualifying series takes place at four venues in Spain; and the following week, the torture chamber that is the European Tour Q-School finals take place in Catalunya where precious tour cards for the 2017 season will be dispensed after six gruelling rounds.
It was there last year Lawrie hit rock bottom, where he questioned the will to keep playing. He didn’t regain his tour card, and his tour category got him into 10 tournaments this season, but the end was nigh long before he finally decided to move to fresh pastures. His last stroke as a tour player came at the KLM Open last month.
Q-School? Never again.
“For guys who have played on tour, it is an absolute nightmare. It’s the worst thing. It’d be like working in a job for years and all of a sudden you’re told to go back to sit the Leaving Cert again. You’re playing against young lads who had just started, who have no idea, and all their thinking is forward, forward, forward! And you’re thinking, ‘if I don’t do this, what’s coming behind me?’ . . . guys coming off tour, who’re worrying about the family, the mortgage, whatever else.
“You should come into tour school, the gates should be locked, you should play your golf and the gates opened again. Nobody should be allowed in other than those playing or caddying. There should be no spectators but there is. I don’t know where they get their kicks from, watching people make fools of themselves under the utmost pressure. My lowest point in my career came at tour school last year, the lowest I have ever been. You know the way runners hit a wall? I hit the wall, really did, as hard as you can possibly imagine and I couldn’t get out of there quickly enough.”
Yet, Lawrie looks back on his life on tour with no regrets. That’s not who he is. He did it the hard way in the early years – playing Asian Tour, Challenge Tour and mini-tours in the States – and when he finally claimed a full tour card, in style by winning the Grand Final on the Challenge Tour, he kept it for 12 straight years.
“When I won the Irish Amateur Close in 1996 I thought, ‘here we go, the world’s my oyster, stay amateur another year, then turn pro and hopefully get my card straight away’. I thought that boom that would happen. It didn’t and I struggled and I’ll be honest I nearly packed it in. I went to Asia in 1999 played over there for a year and they had that non-Asian category so I wasn’t getting into many tournaments, then I came back two years on the Challenge Tour and nothing was happening there.
“At the end of that Christmas I was working in my brother’s company to try and make a few quid for the following year and I was really very close to going ‘that’s it, I have tried, I have given it all I’ve got’, but I’d kind of said to myself I’d give it five years and see what happens and then lo and behold in the fifth year came that breakthrough.”
After those struggles on the development circuits, Lawrie was actually more comfortable on the main tour. “I had a hunger for it and, to be honest, people say you won X amount of money for whatever in your career, but it was never really about the money, it was about being in contention. There is nothing that can buy that feeling of being in contention on a Sunday afternoon going down the stretch.”
On three occasions, Lawrie was trumped in play-offs. Ironically, his only tour win – in the Spanish Open of 2008 – was also in a play-off, against home favourite Ignacio Garrido. He has a photograph of that triumph where’s he has just holed a putt to stay in the sudden-death. But he doesn’t look at himself. His is an outer-body experience. “I’m looking at the crowd’s reaction in the background, and there’s absolute disgust.”
There were the other ones that didn’t go his way, most notably losing out to Simon Dyson in a play-off in the 2009 KLM Open. The one, big regret. “Yes, I could have been a multiple winner on tour but I don’t look back and say I wasted my career. For the level of golfer I was I think I did pretty well. I won on tour, nobody can take that away from me; or that I won ‘rookie of the year’, the only Irish player to win the Sir Henry Cotton award. I can walk away with my head held high.”
There’s one other thing Lawrie intends to do, when time permits.
“Golf’s a fantastic sport, very good for young kids to learn manners and respect and honestly. And I think that’s sometimes lacking in tour life, respect and honesty. I have every intention of when I get the opportunity to sit down and write a letter to one and all playing out there to respect what we have and respect that you have this chance and you take it with both hands and also respect the people who have given you the opportunity.
“You’re going to be playing for a lot of money but you’re meant to be an ambassador not only for yourself but for the tour and you’re meant to look after people, to look after the sponsors who are putting the money up and you get a lot of young lads who don’t do it, who don’t give two hoots about it, who’re they playing with, who put the money in, they’re there for themselves and they’re strutting around the golf course like they own the place.”
In what is inherently a selfish sport, there is one story that reveals Lawrie’s unselfish character. He never played in a Ryder Cup, nor in a World Cup. One year, in 2009, he seemed poised to make the Seve Trophy team in those days when making it was a real achievement.
“I was pretty much in the team and the last counting tournament was in Germany, a shortened field, 80 guys, with guaranteed money. I was exempt. But my daughter was being born, Elizabeth. If I played I would have left Jessica and Millie behind at home with probably their granny and I wasn’t willing to do that. So when Phillipa went in to have Elizabeth, I stayed at home to mind the two girls and to this day I give myself a pat on the back for doing that. I always wanted to be a professional golfer but I wanted to be a good dad as well.”
His wife, he says, has been “a tremendous support for all of my career”. At his worst point after Q-school last year, it was Phillipa who encouraged him to give it one more year. “Like anyone would say behind every good man there is a great woman and she’s been fantastic.”
Lawrie’s last tournament was in the KLM Open, a missed cut. He thought the Alfred Dunhill Links would be a nice way to wave farewell and asked for a sponsor’s invite. It didn’t come. “When I took this job (in Luttrellstown) I was hoping to finish somewhere like the Dunhill or Portugal (next week) or somewhere like that, but it didn’t happened.
“I looked for an invite into the Dunhill and didn’t get one and then you’re saying to yourself, ‘British Masters or Portugal? You’re taking up a spot of somebody who needs it for their card, it would be very unfair’. So I thought, ‘no that’s not the right thing to do’. I didn’t even ask for one for the last two.”
So, the future holds a different calling for Lawrie. The main job will be as director of golf at Luttrellstown, although one finger will remain on the pulse of the tour as a part of the tournament committee where hard decisions are made.
“One in particular recently concerned past champions, who normally play up to 50 and we just brought in a new rule where you have to have a category on tour to use your past champions, so it stops people like me finishing up and going back, ‘ah sure I can play Spanish Open for the next eight years or whatever. That’s a rule against myself.
“ It’s a bigger picture rule, you have to give young lads coming up their chance. Damien McGrane always said it, ‘it’s a fact of life, there’s a change of the guard’. People move on and new people come in. You have to realise that, you can’t just crawl with your finger nails and hang in there. There is a time you have to stop and say, ‘I have done my bit’. I have been very lucky and it is time to let somebody else have a go.”
