It’s been 16 years or so since Alastair Forsyth began, and then stopped, his PGA training degree. The study aids about equipment technology, sports science and business management are probably stuffed somewhere in his garret behind a pile of dusty old 3-woods, one of them battery-operated putt return contraptions and ‘The Illustrated Rangers Yearbook 1998’.
Forsyth had a good excuse for shoving his three-year qualification onto the back burner, of course. “I had just about completed a year of it and at the same time I got my European Tour card at the qualifying school,” reflected Forsyth, who more than made the golfing grade that year as he won the q-school final of 1999 at San Roque to surge on to the main European circuit. “I then got off to a good start the following year on the tour and got my card tied up by about March time so I just put the whole PGA training thing to the side.
“Life would have been a lot easier now had I been qualified but when you’ve done a year and then you get your card for the tour, you don’t look back. Getting on to the tour was always the plan A. At the time, you’re not really thinking about what will happen 16 years down the line. It’s hard enough thinking six months down the line.”
Here in 2015, Forsyth is going back to square one. At 39, he’ll be aiming to finish what he started by embarking on the PGA Foundation degree and becoming a fully qualified professional which can open up more doors than a porter at a busy hotel. Studying, writing essays, getting emails from an irate tutor asking why that assignment hasn’t been completed yet? It will probably be more fun than the life Forsyth was enduring on the tour over the last couple of years.
“I was at an age, late 30s with a young family, and I was travelling here, there and everywhere and it was not worthwhile,” said the former Scottish PGA champion, who won two titles on the main European Tour. “I wasn’t enjoying it, I wasn’t making much of a living out of it and there were no signs to suggest that my game would be good enough to get back up there and compete again. I’d had enough. You just know when the time is right to say ‘that’s it’.”
Along with Steven O’Hara, another former European Tour campaigner who has opted for the PGA route, Forsyth will have an old colleague with whom he can compare study notes – but no copying now, boys – while the opportunity to compete on the domestic Tartan Tour against some hardy perennials will help keep the competitive instincts roused. With a base at the Mearns Castle facility on Glasgow’s south side, Forsyth continues to build up his coaching portfolio as he looks towards a new chapter in his golfing life.
“The teaching side was the obvious thing for me to get into,” he said. “I didn’t want to go back to the Challenge Tour or the EuroPro Tour. They are for the young guys really. If I was fed up travelling on the main tour then I wasn’t going to enjoy the Challenge Tour. To do the things I want to do now, I have to be in the PGA. 39 is no age in golf. If my game was still good I’d still be out there on tour but when there’s no light at the end of the tunnel you need a plan B.”
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