Colin Montgomerie

Colin Montgomerie is a professional golfer and a golf course architect, born on June 23, 1963 at Glasgow in Scotland. His full name is Colin Stuart Montgomerie, and he is known to everyone as Monty. He grew up in Yorkshire, in England. He has won 31 times on the European Tour and finished top of its money list, the Order of Merit, for seven years running from 1993 to 1999 and again in 2005, eight times in all, which is the record on that tour. A major eluded him, but he was runner-up five times — at the U.S. Open in 1994, 1997 and 2006, the PGA Championship in 1995 and the Open Championship in 2005 — and he rose as high as second in the world ranking. He played in the Ryder Cup eight times for Europe without once losing a singles match, and in 2010 he captained the side at Celtic Manor in Wales, leading Europe to a win by 14½ to 13½. Past fifty he did well on the senior circuit too, taking the Senior PGA Championship in 2014 and 2015 and the U.S. Senior Open in 2014. He was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2013 and has been appointed OBE.

His course design work is done under the name Colin Montgomerie Design. By the account of his official site, over the past twenty years or so he has built courses carrying his name in Britain and Ireland, on the European mainland, in the Middle East, in Africa and in the Far East. The one it puts forward as his best known is The Montgomerie at Carton House in County Kildare, Ireland, which opened in 2003 and which he laid out together with European Golf Design. It was named best new design of 2004 by the British magazine Golf World and staged the Irish Open in 2005 and 2006. Montgomerie himself has said of it that it cannot be called a links, but that it plays like one and has every characteristic of one. The site also presents The Montgomerie Maxx Royal at Belek in Turkey, which opened in September 2008 and hosted the Turkish Open from 2013 to 2015, The Dutch in the Netherlands, which opened in May 2011, and the Royal Golf Club at Riffa Views in Bahrain. In his native Scotland he designed Rowallan Castle Golf Club with Ross McMurray of European Golf Design. As his approach to design the official site sets out a routing that makes the most of what the land already offers, and a course that asks to be thought about. Fairways are to be wide and fair, but the rough is to be genuine rough so that an accurate shot is rewarded, and the greens are to have character and to test the player. Beyond that it puts weight on maintenance that can be sustained, and on a course that is a pleasure to play.

In Asia his work is Montgomerie Links, on the coast between Da Nang and Hoi An in central Vietnam. The club’s official site describes it as eighteen holes laid out in links style and the first golf course built on the central Vietnamese coast. His ties with Asia run deep as a player as well: on the Asian Tour he won four times, at the TCL Classic in China in 2002, the Macau Open in 2003, the Caltex Masters played at Laguna National in Singapore in 2004 and the Hong Kong Open in 2005. In the Royal Trophy, the match between Europe and Asia, he served as playing captain of the European side. GoGolf does not at present list any course designed by Montgomerie.

See the other golf course architects here.

Photo: © European Union, 2010（EC Audiovisual Service） / CC BY 4.0