Golf has a way of humbling even the best, and Scottish professional golfer Sandy Lyle explained it in the most honest way possible. Lyle appeared on a podcast, The Big 5 Roundtable, jointly uploaded by the DP World Tour and the Ryder Cup.

When host Iona Stephen asked Lyle what winning the Claret Jug in 1985 meant to him, he didn’t dress it up.

“Well, it’s a schoolboy dream. You see the things that go on ahead of you… so you wanted to try and achieve that. It’s a goal... An Open Championship goal or a major of some sort.”

What made the moment even more striking was how close Lyle had been to disaster just weeks earlier.

“I know two weeks before, I think we were in Ireland,” he recalled, before admitting he shot “90 odd.”

That’s when Ian Woosnam jumped in laughing, “I’m sure it was 100. You picked it up as a dogleg around the corner. It was out of bounds, right? You hit it out of bounds, and you decided, ‘I’m not going to do it,’ and walked in.”

Lyle didn’t argue. “I was playing a five-iron second shot because I played an iron off the tee,” he said. “So I’m going to at least try and break 90. It just shows you how stupid this game is.”

And soon after, a breakthrough came for Lyle

He walked off during a round in Ireland after hitting a ball out of bounds, focused only on trying to break 90. At that point, confidence was low.

Everything changed at Royal St George's Golf Club. Lyle put a new shaft into a McGregor driver he had been given and trusted it for the week. The swing came back. The timing followed. He closed with a 68 and finished seven under par, one shot ahead of Payne Stewart and Mark O'Meara.

The win made Lyle the first Scotsman since 1925 to lift the Claret Jug. For him, it proved how fast golf can turn around. One week, you are walking off a course. Next, you are holding a major trophy.

Written by

Dolly Bhamrick

Edited by

Siddharth Shirwadkar