As we all clamber up the brae on the age front, the days, weeks, months and years seem to hurtle by at such a rate, you almost forget what day, week, month and year it is.
“My wife keeps reminding me that I’m 40 this year,” said Lloyd Saltman with a wry chuckle. “But my birthday’s not until September so I’m clinging to my 30s for a while yet.”
The time does fly. It’s 20 years now since Saltman finished in a share of 15th at the 2005 Open and won the silver medal during a glory-laden period in the amateur ranks that saw him pick up more prizes than a contestant on Brucie’s Generation Game.
“Tiger won that Open and he was my hero, Monty, a great Scot, was second and here’s me next to them both at the prize giving,” added Saltman of a St Andrews experience to savour. “It was if it had been written for me. Tiger shook my hand and said, ‘keep doing what you’re doing’.”
What Saltman was doing at the time was terrific. He was one of the best amateurs in the game and, along with his good friend and rising star Rory McIlroy, was billed as Scotland’s, well, Rory McIlroy.
The Walker Cup duo turned pro on the same day in 2007 but, as McIlroy rocketed away to super stardom like something blasting off at Cape Canaveral, Saltman’s professional career remained on the launchpad.
“It took me a while to settle, and I didn’t get on the European Tour until 2011,” said Saltman, who earned his card the hard way at the qualifying school of 2010 during a tumultuous week which saw allegations of cheating directed at his brother, Elliot, come to a head.
“Like a lot of golfers who have had good amateur careers, I thought I’d go out and get straight on tour. I had a lot of belief in myself and felt it would happen right away like it did for Rory.
“But then it doesn’t, and the consequences quickly build up. You have to go elsewhere to try to earn a foothold and it all takes time to adjust.”
Despite a couple of top-10s during his rookie season on the main European circuit, Saltman couldn’t pull the big result out of the bag and he lost his full status. He would never get it back and his search for that special something in his swing took him down a frustrating, futile path to nowhere.
“I was a fiddler,” he admitted. "It got to the point where I hated walking onto the range because I wasn’t sure what I was trying to do. I’d work on three or four swing thoughts for hours, then I’d leave and think, ‘I’m probably going to try something else tomorrow’.
“I was just feeling lost. When that hits you, then you don’t start improving and you don’t want to practice. The frustration would build, and you stop enjoying competing.”
In 2016, while he was still chipping away on the Challenge Tour, he came a cropper while indulging his passion for Motocross. And you thought Robert MacIntyre playing shinty on his weeks off was risky?
“I ruptured my right ACL and was out for 11 months,” he said of this particular sair yin. “But I loved the motorbikes. I found it hard to switch off from golf.
“When I got on that bike, though, and was coming towards a jump, I certainly wasn’t thinking about my backswing. People said I was mad. But I needed that separation from the pressure of trying to perform on the golf course.”
Saltman did manage a victory on Paul Lawrie’s Tartan Pro Tour back in 2021 but his golfing focus these days is very much on helping others as he continues to build up a hefty coaching portfolio from his base at Musselburgh Golf Club.
“Golf is in my blood,” said Saltman, who swapped the tools of his golfing trade for the cutters, trowels and spacers of his brother’s tiling business for a spell. “I’ve learned so much, and experienced so many good times and plenty of bad times too. I felt I had a lot to give back.”
Saltman’s accomplishments as a young ‘un, meanwhile, still resonate. “My son, Max, had to do a school project on a famous Scottish person,” he said.
“His teacher told me that he’d decided to do it on me. I said to him ‘you never told me about this’ and he said, ‘dad, I just Googled you and YouTubed you’. It was nice to hear he thought his dad was a famous Scotsman.”
