Young Craig Lawrie off to a flier

MANAGING to stay significantly calmer than either of his watching parents, Craig Lawrie made an impressive winning debut in the Scottish Boys' Championship on another windswept day on the East Lothian coast at Dunbar.

"That wasnae easy," admitted dad Paul, the former Open champion, of an experience that ended with the smile back on his face as well as wife Marian, who reckoned watching the 15-year-old against Renfrew's Lewis Kerr had been "much tougher" than the countless occasions she's trailed round watching her husband over the years.

More in the Ian Woosnam or Craig Parry mould at the moment but a crisp ball striker like his father, Lawrie, who has trimmed his handicap to 3.0 from 4.3 at the start of the season on the back of two 72s and a career-best 69 at home club Deeside in recent weeks, got off to a flyer in one of the last of the 128 first-round ties.

Helped no doubt by the practice round he'd had along the coast at Gullane in similar conditions the previous day, the fourth-year pupil at Robert Gordon's College in Aberdeen used the wind to good effect to find the heart of the green with a 7-iron approach at the first. With his opponent straying into the stream that snakes across the front of the green with his second from 20 yards closer, Lawrie won that with a birdie-4 then, after a good up and down for a half at the second, also claimed the short third, this time with a par. Three up after six, he then lost the seventh and eighth, the latter to a three-putt that, coupled with the same thing happening at the 12th, were, according to his dad, the only times the youngster had "put a foot wrong" in the match. Indeed, Lawrie soon restored his three-hole cushion and, though he opened the door slightly for Kerr with a tee shot at the par-3 16th that came up well short, a six-foot putt for a bogey-5 at the next was safely despatched into the hole for a 2 and 1 success.

"It is good to get through my first match and now I'm looking forward to seeing how far I can go in the event," said Lawrie, who has qualified for his father's Foundation match-play event in the Grampian region for the first time this year and, ultimately, wants to join him in the paid ranks. He now faces Strathmore's Rory Tinker and, by the sounds of things, that promises to far more nerve-wracking for Lawrie Snr than he ever felt when recording any of his six career victories at the top level, the most recent, of course, having come within the last month when he returned to winning ways in the Andalucia Open.

"We are very proud of him," he admitted. "This is the first big tournament we've watched him play in and the first tee wasn't great. But he played lovely at the start, hitting a lot of good shots.It was a tough wind out there and he did extremely well."

A win over 17-year-old Tinker is likely to earn Lawrie a crack at Barassie's Jack McDonald, a semi-finalist at West Kilbride 12 months ago and, according to him, a much better player now thanks to the work he has been doing with former Italian Open champion Dean Robertson, now the performance director at Stirling University.

A first-year Applied Maths student there, McDonald, the 2009 Scottish Boys' Stroke Play champion, opened his title bid with a comfortable 6 and 4 win over Blairgowrie's Fergus Sanderson. "My long game in particular has improved a lot since last year thanks to being at Stirling," said the 18-year-old Ayrshireman. "Dean is so enthusiastic and he is passing that down to me."

Among those already through to the third round are defending champion Grant Forrest, two-time Scottish Under-14 champion Bradley Neil and Scottish Junior Champion of Champion Craig Ross. However, Ewan Scott, one of the eight seeds, is out. He went down 3 and 2 to 15-year-old Connor Syme, whose dad, Stuart, now the professional at Dumfries & County, reached the semi-finals at the same venue in 1987, losing to eventual winner Andrew Coltart.