Carly Booth will have good reason to remember how she felt when she hit perhaps the easiest-looking shot of all the 212 it took to become Aberdeen Asset Management Scottish Ladies Open champion.
That’s because the mere 2ft putt suddenly became the hardest of them all, an attack of nerves that had previously been absent coming just as she looked to become at 19 that youngest Scot to win a top tour title at Archerfield.
Yet that short putt which heartstoppingly lingered on the side of the hole before dropping might turn out to be the biggest step in Carly’s much-publicised career that began when she was the youngest player to win a club championship, at Dunblane New, at just 11 years old.
It won her the national title, a three-year exemption on the Ladies European Tour, places in two women’s majors, the British Open and the Evian Masters. But it also means that massive expectation placed on a teenage girls’ slim shoulders has not only been lifted but actually fulfilled.
The amount of time Carly has been in the golfing public’s eye tends to make one forget that she is still a teenager, at least for another two months, and that this first big win, far from being overdue, is actually ahead of schedule.
”The expectation has been enormous, but I’m 19 and I’ve just won my first LET event,” she said as she pondered the 34,000 euro winners’ cheque, ten times that from her first pro victory at the LET Access event last month in France.
”I’m just overwhelmed and just so happy, especially that I don’t have to go back to Tour School, maybe ever.
”Three rounds here under par in tough conditions this early in the year shows that my game is in exactly the right place.”
It’s also vindication for Carly’s parents, who have put so much into her career as well as brothers Wallace, also a golf pro, and Paul, who won gold medals in the Special Olympics.
Dad Wallace Snr famously built a golf course on his farm near Comrie as his children excelled at the game.
”I don’t think there’s any question I wouldn’t be playing, or certainly not to this standard if I didn’t have a golf course in my back garden,” continued Carly. ”I owe so much to my mum and dad and all that they’ve done for me and I can’t thank them enough.”
The final round in perfect sunshine at Archerfield turned out to be almost a straight matchplay contest between Carly and her former GB&I Curtis Cup team-mate Florentyna Parker, and it hinged on the tricky 16th, where it seemed the English girl had an advantage after a rare wayward Booth drive.
”I was still well short in two and had a difficult chip and run, and I thought that the worst Florrie was making was a par,” said the champion.
Instead, Booth chipped to five feet and made it for her par, while Parker three-putted to give Carly the advantage for the final stretch.
The Perthshire girl only showed any nerves over that final putt, with a nervy deceleration into the ball and she admitted her heart skipped a beat.
”It only just got it in, and I must have felt the nerves at last, because I was fine all the way until then,” she said.
She won’t have those nerves again, however, and she plans to stay on the LET rather than go to America just yet.
”My aim was always to win on this tour and establish myself before thinking about the LPGA,” she said. ”I don’t think I’m ready for that just yet.”
Photo by Lynne Cameron/PA Wire