Links Magazine | The Best Of Golf

A Sandy Lie continued...

Two decades later, one wonders whether the Scot had as much faith in himself as Ballesteros had in him. “I did think I’d win more majors but…’’ he fades. “But I guess I just burned out. I had a good chance of winning the money lists in America and Europe in 1988 and I started chasing it: competing, competing, competing.”

By the time the PGA Tour reached Florida the following March, he was mentally and physically spent. “I got to the stage where I didn’t have any interest, mostly because my game wasn’t any good,” he says, shaking his head at his own stupidity. “That’s when you start thinking and you start experimenting and you start searching for ways and means. My thoughts then were: ‘If things aren’t going well I’ll just work harder.’

“If I’d had my brain switched on I would have said to myself, ‘Hey, you need to go and take a month or two months off and get your breath.’”

Instead, Lyle went to the range in search of a swing, a depressingly ominous exercise for a player who had thrived on innate talent rather than technical precision. Like other overanalytic tinkerers before and since—Ralph Guldahl, Ian Baker-Finch—the results were predictable.

Lyle won four more tournaments in Europe but was never again a force at the highest level: After tying for seventh at the 1988 British Open, he never again finished in the top 10 in a major. For the last few years he has flitted around on the fringes of the European Tour, overlooked for the Ryder Cup captaincy and never looking less than sheepishly uncomfortable. “It is very frustrating when you know what you can do as a golfer yet you are getting nowhere near it,” he says.

But the beauty of Lyle’s even temperament is that regret doesn’t linger long while optimism quickly bubbles to the surface. He is relishing the coming season and with good cause. For one thing, it means another return trip to Augusta National, where he made the cut at last year’s Masters.

And he has just turned 50. Lyle knows there are no guarantees on the Champions Tour, where many players who have been expected to thrive have made little impression. But he has been in the doldrums long enough to welcome any opportunity to reset the clock.

“It’ll be nice to get out there and play with people my own age,’’ he says. “It’s a clean slate, a fresh start, whatever you want to call it. And I like that idea a lot.”

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