Marcus Armitage: From sleeping in a tent to a first proper Open shot

Wed, 14 Jul, 2021 - 20:00

Paul Keane

With his thick Huddersfield accent, perma-grin and general effervescence, Marcus Armitage was a good choice to get the 149th Open Championship underway on Thursday morning.

The 33-year-old earned his place at Royal St George's way back in January of 2020, draining a 15-footer on the 72nd hole of the South African Open to secure his spot and will tee it up in the opening group alongside Richard Bland and Andy Sullivan at 6.35am.

Since qualifying, he has achieved a couple of firsts; entering the record books in April for hitting a golf ball over 300 yards into a moving car - a BMW M8 convertible, for the record - and more recently winning his first European Tour event, last month's Porsche European Open.

There are other reasons why you may have heard of Armitage, from posting a Twitter video of him putting in a hotel room, naked, to hassling Tiger Woods and Sergio Garcia for selfies at the 2017 Omega Dubai Desert Classic.

Or maybe you followed him in Monaghan almost eight years ago to the day when he won the Kingspan Concra Wood Open on the PGA EuroPro Tour.

That was his breakthrough win as a professional and came with a remarkable backstory. Three months earlier, he and his father, both penniless, had slept in a tent during April qualifying school week at Frilford Heath.

“My dad woke up one morning and he had a frog in his part of the tent,” Armitage told the No Laying Up podcast earlier this year. “I was like, ‘what have you been doing with that frog?’ The frog was lifeless. I think he’d rolled over on him in the night.”

During his first round at Q-school, Armitage found £40 stuffed in the box of his rangefinder in his golf bag. A pal had put it there and told him to spend it wisely. If he blew it on food or drink, or worse, then he didn’t deserve to qualify was the gist of the message.

“I think the first round I shot about 75,” recalled Armitage. “I found the money then and we went and bought two quilts and I got some really good sleep and we ended up shooting 66, 66 or something to get my card.”

The fear that Armitage may not use the money wisely was well-founded. He admits he struggled with drug addiction at one stage, acknowledging he has known a ‘rougher side of life’ and putting that period down to delayed grieving for his mother who passed away when he was 13 in 2001.

“A lot of people can judge me for it, for the path that I went down, but it moulded who I am today. I went off track, eventually I got addicted to drugs but at the end of the day, I think it was grieving later on in my career, I think golf had put the grieving off for my mum for so long and then when I stopped the golf (because of an injury) it all of a sudden hit me and I went down a path.

“I mean, they were only light drugs that I got addicted to, it weren’t anything heavy. I think I lost my driving licence through it, I got a DUI in 2013 and at that point my dad said to me, ‘right, this is it, we’re back to square one’.

“He started taking me to the golf club again, eight o’clock in the morning until six at night.

“I had no car or nothing, I just practised my way out of it. In 2013, I came back out on the mini-tours and started burning it up again.”

There are other intriguing angles to the Armitage tale, like the financial problems he endured after racking up debts while chasing European Tour status. Or returning to work on the building sites five years ago, grinding concrete.

Ireland has typically provided a haven, from earning £10,000 with that win in 2013 at Concra Wood — a pal was entitled to half of it after agreeing to fund his golf for 50 per cent of the winnings — to his tied second finish in 2016 on the Challenge Tour at Mount Wolseley. He finished tied 41st at Mount Juliet earlier this month and received a cheque for €15,804.40.

Now 124th in the world rankings, he heads for just his second appearance at the Open. You could argue that it’s actually his first given that he played the burnt-out 2018 Open at Carnoustie with one arm. The previous week he’d dislocated his left shoulder badly while indoor skydiving. “I felt my arm pop clean out of its socket, it was dislocated for two and a half hours because I didn’t know the move to pop it back in,” he said.

The medics told him to forget golf for the rest of that year. He didn’t listen. Aside from needing the cash, he’d always dreamed of playing the Open and pegged it up in Scotland the following week. He recalls hitting ‘chippy drivers’ on day 1 and shooting 80. The following day he holed everything — I was like Jordan Spieth in his heyday on the greens, rolling them in from everywhere. I only had 21 putts that day and carded a 69.”

All or nothing, win or bust. It’ll be some book whenever he writes it. Probably worth keeping an eye on the Englishman at Sandwich this week.

- The full interview with Marcus Armitage is on the No Laying Up podcast