Martin Laird not the only Scot to be making a Masters debut

IT could well be the most nerve-racking moment of his career. Seconds after the Sky TV cameras start rolling at Augusta National for the first time, they will focus on a smartly-dressed Glaswegian who, like Martin Laird, is making his Masters debut this week but will be judged on his skills as a presenter rather than anything he does with a putter on the lighting-fast greens.

David Livingstone has been the face of satellite station's golf coverage for as long as it has covered the Royal & Ancient game, hosting programmes just about every week of the year on both sides of the Atlantic. He's a slick operator in a studio he shares with Butch Harmon, Peter Oosterhuis and, occasionally, David Howell. At Augusta, Colin Montgomerie has been drafted on to the team.

Yet, for all that he has set the scene at more tournaments than some people have had hot dinners, the man known as 'Livo' by his colleagues admits he'll be as nervous as some of those standing up on the first tee when Sky, not the BBC, provide the first-day coverage of the season's opening major on Thursday.

Livingstone has never been to Augusta before. "But I feel as if I have due to Butch, who has such a close association with the place due to his father, Claude, winning the Masters in 1948." Seeing it all for himself, he's not ashamed to admit he'll be walking about wide-eyed. "There's no point being blase about it," he adds. "For all I've been at a lot of big occasions over the years, it is nice to be going to something that is going to be completely new to me."

Covering the biggest golf events on the calendar certainly isn't new to either Livingtone or his channel. Screening the Augusta action for the first time is the perfect way to celebrate 20 years of Sky Sports and you can certainly expect to see a few twists from the norm this week, starting with coverage of the traditional Par-3 event tomorrow. "We really want to put our brand on it as much as we can," says Livingstone, a newspaper journalist in the early part of his career before joining STV, where he did a mix of both reporting and presenting. "We want to do what we do in golf and, while the event has a great tradition of its own which we are aware of and want to fit in with, we want to put a new slant on everything."

Livingstone, of course, isn't the only Scot on the station's golf team. And, in his eyes at least, he plays a supporting role to the main commentator, Ewen Murray.

"Ewen, for me, is the star of the show and he should be from a Scottish point of view given his origins in the game," observes Livingstone, a one-time member at Pollok in Glasgow but, following a hip operation four years ago, now limited to the odd game, mainly down at Prestwick in the company of an old friend. "I think the transition he made from golfer to commentator is bar none the smoothest I have ever seen."Murray didn't miss Tiger Woods earlier in the year, first criticising the 14-time major winner for ignoring youngsters seeking his autograph during the Desert Classic in Dubai then blasting him with both barrels for spitting on a green. Some people reckoned it was about time that someone on Sky had dared to criticise Woods but Livingstone believes it is a case of enthusiasm being confused as favouritism. "There is a line you have to take when someone is the story. When, for instance, he was leading his own tournament, the Chevron Challenge last November, I think we got really excited about the idea of Tiger winning again. We unashamedly built it as the chance for Tiger to win for the first time in a year. In the early stages of the final round Graeme McDowell was overhauling his lead but we were still pushing the Tiger story and we began to get a trickle of emails in saying, 'here we go again it's the Tiger Woods worship thing'.

"I mentioned this email on air and said that people were all entitled to their views and they should email in if they wanted. Within a few minutes we had 600 emails and you could almost have put a knife through the middle of them - 50 per cent said Tiger Woods is why we watch TV golf and the other 50 said 'yes that guy was right'. It is a difficult path to tread but since Sky Golf came on the scene we feel privileged to have been part of history being made by possibly the best player who has ever played the game. I don't think you can shy away from that - it is obvious he is box office. There is no favouritism towards Tiger but I would not deny that we get excited about Tiger doing well."

Laird, of course, was the star of the show in front of the cameras recently as he won the Arnold Palmer Invitational but, according to his fellow Scot, hasn't always enjoyed the attention he's deserved since he started to become one of the leading lights on the PGA Tour over the past year or so.

"I spoke to Martin Laird a few weeks back at Doral and I felt bad about it," recalls Livingstone. "One day he'd shot a really good score and was only a couple of shots off the lead. Yet there as a media group we were chasing Martin Kaymer, Lee Westwood, Dustin Johnson and Nick Watney. Martin came out of scoring area and walked quietly past unannounced. He was hardly recognised. I went over to him and said 'sorry, we should be paying more attention to you'.

However, he said he was quite happy to be getting on with his job." Sky Sports will show coverage from over 200 golf events this year, including five days of live 3D coverage of The Masters