Colin Montgomerie shares a laugh with Tom Cox

George Plimpton said the best professional golfers had “the grim yet placid and bored look of cowpokes, slack bodied in their saddles, who’ve been tending their herds for two days”. It’s a description – from Plimpton’s wonderful book about the American PGA Tour in the 1960s, The Bogey Man – that will probably never be bettered. But it could not really be said to apply to Colin Montgomerie.

The golfing public has experienced the naked pain of Montgomerie’s five runner-up finishes in major championships, most notably the 2006 US Open at Winged Foot, where he collided with a state trooper after storming off the final green. But no British player in recent memory has stoked the crowd more while playing well. Nobody’s shoulders tell you more about the way they’re feeling than Monty’s. As he admits to me himself: “People have seen the best and worst of me on golf courses.”

When I’d told friends I was going for a lesson with him at Walton Heath Golf Club in Surrey, they’d groaned and worried for me, making references to his sometimes difficult relationship with journalists, and the cruel nickname given to him by American crowds: “Mrs Doubtfire”.

But while the Monty I’ve been prepared for superficially resembles the Monty I meet – both have the same genteel Scottish accent, both enter a room chest first – the latter is a much more charming and inquisitive creature. Watching him work the Walton Heath clubhouse, remembering who does what, who’s just got married, is like being briefly inside a golfing version of Primary Colours. I know he likes Walton Heath. This is where he came, aged 18, with a relatively unimpressive handicap of seven, to watch the 1981 Ryder Cup. And this is where, watching Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson, he had an epiphany about his future career. But I can’t believe his mood is entirely down to the place.

Tom Cox looks on as Colin Montgomerie swings into action at Walton Heath Golf Club

Naturally, most of us who’ve been following pro golf for the past two decades know Monty wants to be liked. You can see it in his overuse of “Sure!” in interviews, in the grimacingly careful way he picks his words. As a cynic, you could imagine that, as the Ryder Cup captain for 2010 at Celtic Manor, nearing the end of his competitive playing days, he’s on a Faldo-esque PR drive to change his public image. But I spent five hours with Faldo at the height of his PR push, and I felt nothing then as genuine as what I feel now from Monty. When he says, “A lot of pros view playing in pro-ams as a duty at best, but I really like meeting new people, seeing how different they are on the golf course to the way they are off it,” I believe him.

He’s also a good teacher. Ideally, I’d be getting a driving lesson, since that’s the strongest part of his game, but I’ve opted for advice on pitching and chipping, because it’s a part of my golfing arsenal that’s long been in tatters. Monty doesn’t tell me anything new; it’s the talk where he excels – communicating an idea or feeling with the right choice of words. When he hits the ball himself, it’s so beautifully buttery and slow – “Nobody will ever benefit from me telling them to speed up their swing” – as to be infectious, but he is also able to mimic “The Panicked Squid”, or what I also refer to as “my swing”, in a way I comprehend implicitly.

It’s not been the easiest of years for Montgomerie. At the time of writing, he lies 103rd on the 2009 European Tour money list – a list he has topped a record eight times, seven of them consecutively. Perhaps even more distressing has been “Jakartagate”, the spat with Sandy Lyle over Lyle’s accusations that Montgomerie took an illegal drop during the 2005 Indonesian Open. He won’t talk about this any more, but he does cite Lyle as an example of how some pros needlessly overcomplicate their game: “People who were so successful doing it their own way, then got told they were doing it the wrong way, tried to change it, and couldn’t find their way back”.

Monty, by contrast, has never dismantled his swing. “When I’m working on it,” he tells me, “I’m mostly really just working on tempo.”

We concentrate on the change of pace between my backswing and downswing. When I shank a chip, I tell him I did so because I was worrying about becoming too deliberate in the changeover. “But that’s because you’re worried, not because you’re actually becoming too deliberate. What are you worried for?” The question comes across as: “Why would anyone be worried, on a golf course?” He says he has only ever been properly, cripplingly nervous once during a professional tournament: on the first tee of the final day singles at the 2002 Ryder Cup. “I didn’t want to be there. Then I hit a good shot, and I really wanted to be there.”

As Monty talks, he sometimes closes his eyes to think about his answers to my questions. On TV, this can look like a frown, but close-up it just looks like he’s conscientious, keen to interact and offer his best. Is this really the same person my friend Mousey saw on Wentworth’s putting green 19 years ago looking a bit stern, at whom he cheekily shouted: “Don’t cry, Colin!”

I feel bad about being in on that now, and not just because Monty has charmed me, and turned the Panicked Squid into a mere Panicked Prawn. Rather it’s because, regardless of his faults, we should be celebrating a genuine team golfer who’s human and interested in the world around him. If I was teeing up at Celtic Manor next autumn, I can’t think of a person I’d rather call Boss.

Tom Cox is the author of ‘Nice Jumper’ and ‘Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia’

pursuits@ft.com

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The details
Walton Heath Golf Club, Surrey, www.whgc.co.uk