It’s not been the greatest of summers, has it? Saying that, when I started composing this Tuesday tour de farce – yes, I meant to write farce there – the sun was actually shining.
But then it swiftly disappeared as I got halfway through typing the word ‘shining’. It was half-decent while it lasted. That’s the weather I’m talking about, not the intro to this column.
It’s getting to the point where we could just about sum up this so-called brightest, warmest season by paraphrasing that chuckling Ronnie Corbett yarn of yore. “I remember the Scottish summer clearly because it was the one day of the year when there wasn’t a sale at Allied Carpets.”
Flinging that gag in there reminds me of the sage advice the late, great golf correspondent and raconteur, Peter Corrigan, once gave to an aspiring journalist about writing the perfect piece. “Get your joke in the intro and run like f*** to the end.” On that note, we’d better start running.
As we hurtle towards the peak season, what a timely tonic we got with Ewen Ferguson’s win at the BMW International Open in Munich. Scotland’s fitba players may have flopped like a weary Dick Fosbury on German soil during the Euros but Ferguson showed them how to do it with the dimpled ball.
You half expected the remnants of the Tartan Army to storm the green and jubilantly snap the flag like the Wembley crossbar.
It was victory No 3 for Ferguson on the DP World Tour and what a time to do it. Ahead of this week’s Genesis Scottish Open at the Renaissance, the Bearsden man will be on such a high, he’ll probably soar into East Lothian like a bird catching a thermal updraft.
Earning a place in the following week’s Open at Royal Troon, meanwhile, was another huge spin-off from his success.
Good things come to those who win. And it was a cracking win of poise and purpose, wasn’t it? Watching the 28-year-old play the 18th hole with a decent cushion, there was a moment that possibly struck a chord with all golfers as he sized up a safe, positional second shot on the par-5.
“No water in play?,” he tentatively asked his caddie, as he looked for reassurance about a burn that meandered across the fairway.
Even for a player of Ferguson’s quality and ability, the menace of the wet stuff as the tension mounted still teased and tormented the thoughts even though it was never going to be in play for him.
As for us crude howkers and hoikers who are confronted with a similar scenario? Well, the mere hint of a water hazard, no matter how remote or distant, would inevitably lead to inexplicable calamity due to a feeble mind that’s been cursed and seared by ceaseless golfing atrocities.
Ferguson, of course, is made of sterner stuff. Those of us who documented his various accomplishments in the amateur scene a number of years ago always harboured hopes that he could do something as a professional.
Then again, we’ve harboured hopes for countless emerging talents before and they’ve disappeared quicker than some of the SNP’s seats amid the unsparing rigours of the professional game.
It's 10 years now since Ferguson won the Scottish Boys’ Championship at West Kilbride, just eight months after landing the Boys’ Amateur crown at Hoylake.
Even as a teenager, he had the kind of gallus swagger you’d get with a lion at the height of the mating season and his golfing feats backed up his confident, chirpy demeanour.
There was always a smiling, winking soundbite for us lot in the press too. "My dad had told them to get their arses down to West Kilbride," he chuckled at the time as he praised the Bearsden membership for turning out for that Scottish Boys’ win in Ayrshire back in 2014.
Ferguson, who would go on to play in the Walker Cup, ticked all the right boxes. But professional golf, with its tangle of complex, varied demands, is much more than a box-ticking exercise.
This hard, fickle business of fine margins is awash with players whose talent and potential has, for a whole host of reasons, been unfulfilled.
Ferguson, though, continues to prove that he is the real deal. Who will be the real deal in this week’s $9 million Scottish showpiece remains to be seen.
Tied for 12th last year, Ferguson will be confident of putting in another sprightly shift as he looks to make his mark against some of the game’s biggest names.
Robert MacIntyre, pipped to the title by Rory McIlroy a year ago after a valiant final day charge that could’ve featured a lance and a shield, returns to the Renaissance as a PGA Tour champion.
Hopes then of a first Scottish winner of a Scottish Open since Colin Montgomerie in1999 – it wasn’t actually called the Scottish Open then but let’s not get bogged down in detail – remain, dare I say it, reasonably high.
McIlroy, meanwhile, will emerge from a three-week period of rest, recuperation and reflection following his shattering loss at the US Open which prompted a retreat from the frontline.
With The Open looming on the horizon, a wounded yet defiant McIlroy will probably come out with all guns blazing.
There’s probably more chance of that than blazing sunshine. Bloomin’ summer, eh?
