IN the years since his mother's death from cancer, Scots golfer and Ryder Cup captain Colin Montgomerie has often wished he had dealt with it better. Now he's creating a lasting tribute to the woman he credits with his success by establishing a new foundation and Maggie's Centre in her memory
IT HAS been almost 18 years since Colin Montgomerie's mother Elizabeth succumbed to lung cancer at the age of 53, yet Mother's Days don't get any easier for Scotland's most famous golfer. The recently appointed Ryder Cup captain can count raising three happy children, having a stellar career and finding love as a trio of major successes, but at this time of year even those achievements offer little but cold comfort. Instead, he is struck by the poignancy of those milestones because they were what his mother always wanted for him.
If Mothering Sunday is there to make us spare a thought for the first lady in our lives, it has certainly worked for Montgomerie. "At this time of year I go into shops and see Mother's Day cards and think, 'I don't buy them any more,' although I quickly snap to and realise that I do because I have teenage children," says Montgomerie. "Doing that for them and not for me always bring a sadness, a sense of loss."
Back in 2007, Montgomerie decided it was time to do something to soothe the aching sense of loss and regret that his mother's death had left him with. "I remember the moment the word 'cancer' was mentioned as if it was yesterday," he recalls. "We knew she was ill but didn't know how ill, and then the word 'cancer' was mentioned and of course you think the worst, which is unfortunately what we got. If you diagnose and treat it early there are cures, but she was too far down the line. We didn't understand that, though, and wish we'd had someone we could have gone to talk to."
Almost two decades later, the result is the Elizabeth Montgomerie Foundation, set up to provide practical and emotional support to cancer patients, their families and carers. Its first project is a campaign that aims to raise around £3.2 million over the next three years to fund the building of a Maggie's Cancer Caring Centre at Monklands Hospital, outside Airdrie. The venue is well chosen, with the area being one of Europe's cancer hotspots: 3,500 people in Lanarkshire will be diagnosed with cancer next year, and the area's inhabitants are 50% more likely to be diagnosed with lung cancer than people elsewhere in the UK.
The fund-raising campaign is picking up speed, but reopening the wounds hasn't been plain sailing for Montgomerie, who has donated a significant amount of his own money to setting up the foundation. Replaying his mother's death after years of trying to move on has been a gruelling experience. "Opening up this area of my life and talking about the Maggie's Centres is not easy," he says. "Talking about my mum and about cancer has brought it all flooding back and has made me realise just how much I regret that maybe I wasn't able to always say the right things at the right time.
"I couldn't even put my finger on what I should have said to her that I didn't. I did say a lot, and whether or not it was the right things I don't know, but I would have loved to have had a more professional idea of what to say. I've got this tremendous sense of things left unsaid – I think everyone does. It's very frustrating to think that I might not have adequately told her how much I appreciated everything she did for me in my life, how much I loved her."
The short period between his mother's diagnosis and the moment when her youngest son received the phone call to tell him of her death meant he had little time to get used to the idea that she would no longer be there for him. Even the month he spent with his mother immediately before she died was little consolation. Which is why he chose to support Maggie's Centres, which provide support for both patients and their families. Staff at the centres help them come to terms with death – which is different to the way his mother reacted, angrily fighting the disease to the very end and perhaps failing to find inner peace before her demise – but there is also no-nonsense guidance on life after cancer. It was a holistic approach that he had craved back in 1991, when it was his mother dying. "We're very British about these things, and sometimes we found it hard to find the right words to talk about what was going to happen to my mum.
"I think the patient finds it less difficult," he says, "which is why the role that the Maggie's Centres play with the families left behind is so crucial. For families to understand and be aware of what will happen before it's too late is very important."
Having visited the Maggie's Centre in Dundee, Montgomerie says, "The support mechanisms I found in the Dundee centre really amazed me; it would be impossible to walk out of there as the same person who walked in. The care for the patients, the expertise and the trust are key because sometimes you don't get that in major hospitals. That's what we want to be able to give people who come to the new centre: care and advice you can trust. This whole project isn't just about the patient, it's all about the families too. How do they cope? I wish my father had had the support of that to understand what to say and how to say it in a caring manner to his own wife."
Just how special the Maggie's Centres are was brought home to him during that Dundee visit, when he bumped into Colin Smith, a caddy he had known for many years and who was suffering from a brain tumour. In the five years since he had been diagnosed, his condition had deteriorated markedly. Montgomerie, one of life's more emotional souls, dissolved.
His decision to effectively throw his weight behind setting up a new Maggie's Centre was vindicated by the reaction of his wife Gaynor. She thought the place was "amazing" – an important endorsement, given that she has first-hand knowledge of bereavement. Montgomerie met his second wife after she was widowed – her husband, Sterling Furniture businessman George Knowles, dropped dead at the age of 41, shattering his closely knit family and leaving Gaynor to bring up four young children alone. "Gaynor has been a great support, but then I think we've helped each other. Losing her husband, as she did back in 2003, was not easy," he explains. "Her kids' father went away on holiday and never came home – a tragic case. I'm just glad we met and can talk about that openly: she can talk to me about her late husband and I can talk to her about my mum, and we can relate stories and situations that happened. It is amazing how that shared experience drew us to the Maggie's Centre."
She has also helped her new husband find the perspective he readily admits was missing from his life, and which he blames for the breakdown of his first marriage. At one golf tournament, he stormed off the course in a fug of bad humour, telling his wife the round was a disaster. "A bad round of golf is not a disaster," she reproved him. "A disaster is four children left without a father." For once, he was at a loss for words."It helps that Gaynor doesn't play golf because our conversation has never revolved around golf and hopefully never will – I can now leave my game where it should be, on the course."
If Montgomerie and his wife share a bond forged through adversity, the same is true of the golfer and his father James. Montgomerie's second marriage was a particularly difficult time for his father because Elizabeth had been diagnosed with cancer shortly before his first wedding, attending even though she was already seriously ill. The photos show a formidable woman who had just six months to live but cut an impressive figure in a fuchsia dress and wide-brimmed hat. At the time, Montgomerie was still struggling to come to terms with her illness – "We all feel our parents are immortal, that they'll go on for ever" – and her absence made his second wedding just as emotional as the first. "My wedding to Gaynor was very difficult," he says. "There were only three grandparents there, and it really felt like there was someone missing. I did relate to that in my speech, to my dad really, in a really personal way in front of 300 people. He knew what I meant, I knew what I meant, and that's all that was important."
Montgomerie says he often dwells on his regrets with regards to his mother, and none is more acute than the fact that she never lived to see any of her three grandchildren born, the first arriving just two years after she died. Yet almost as insistent is his belief that she would have taken greater joy from his prodigious golfing achievements than perhaps anyone else in the world. A nine-handicapper, she was his golfing muse and support team rolled into one in his early days. Probably more than anyone else, Montgomerie's mother truly believed in him. "A great sadness in my life is that she never saw my great success, a lot of which was down to her. I hope she knew it was coming but I can't be sure, and that's a great shame because, more than anything else, when I think of Mum I think of the golf. She enjoyed her golf and was a natural. We could talk about golf together, and I've missed that ability to talk to her about my career and what's going on because she understood it fully – not just the action of hitting a golf ball but about making a score, the mental side of things, what went in to making a score and why certain people won and certain people didn't."
Elizabeth Montgomerie was highly ambitious for her son and prepared to roll up her sleeves if she thought it would help. In his amateur days, when he was trying to qualify for the European Tour and was in a Spanish hotel with 500 other hopefuls, she fretted that he and his caddy wouldn't eat properly, if at all. So she arrived at the resort of La Manga and took over, doing the shopping and the cooking before walking every yard of the course with her son. "I got out intact and flew home from there with a European Tour card in my pocket, and I'm still convinced that wouldn't have happened without her support," says Montgomerie. "She was more like a friend than a mother."
Indeed, bereft of his mother's stabilising influence and sage advice, the young Montgomerie was so overwhelmed with emotion for the next two years that his game went to pot. "I didn't win a tournament for a couple of years after Mum's diagnosis and death. I did struggle, there's no question about that. Every bogey became a double bogey. I'd walk to the next tee and wonder what it was all about. I won in 1989 but didn't win again until the back end of 1991. I was expected to go forward but didn't because I wasn't mentally there. I'd find myself thinking about her out on the course. It was okay when I was getting birdies or pars, but if I got a bogey my mind would wander and if it was a double bogey, it was a nightmare, I just collapsed. It wasn't an easy time."
Talking to Montgomerie, it's easy to see why his mother's loss was so traumatic. She was at the heart of the family, taking him and his older brother Douglas to watch Leeds United at Elland Road in their glory days, shouting from the sidelines at rugby and cricket matches. "I was particularly close to my mother – boys always are. My brother Douglas was two years older than me but felt exactly the same way. Dad was always there, was the worker, but mum kept the whole show on the road; she was the centre of the family."
The sons may not have coped well with losing their mother, but their father had more prosaic considerations to deal with. "For a man of my father's generation to be left on his own can be more difficult because he's not domesticated. He has been off working, so how the hell does the dishwasher work, what do I do for food, how does a washing machine work – these are things he would have taken for granted when a woman, a wife, a mother, is in the home. The shopping gets done, the place gets cleaned, the stuff that a housewife does. But he used his army background, took it as a challenge, got on with it and has won that challenge."
A lot of Montgomerie's motivation for investing his time and money into the Monklands project is a fervent desire to leave his father with something solid to mark the passing of the love of his life. This imperative is yet another reason for hooking up with Maggie's Centres, who have a track record of producing iconic buildings. There's the Dundee centre, designed by Frank Gehry and perched high above the Tay, and Zaha Hadid's futuristic Kirkcaldy masterpiece, while Rem Koolhaas is building the new Maggie's at Gartnavel, in Glasgow. Montgomerie says "an architect of worldwide standing" will be designing the building that will one day bear his mother's name. "It's very important for my dad that there's a tangible monument to my mum," he says. "He's coming up to 80, and for this to be in place for him, to pay tribute to his lifelong partner, would be great.
"As for me, I had a charitable fund but found I was giving £500 here, £100 there, £1,000 somewhere else, and it was getting lost in the wash a wee bit. I talked to my dad and felt that I was really in a position to help raise funds for something substantial, to do something concrete – and there's nothing more concrete than a building. I wanted to put something back into the community. This will be as important to me over the next five years as my golf."
Not that money is a panacea. The disease that killed Elizabeth Montgomerie was a direct result of 35 years of smoking, and if her son is determined that those afflicted by the condition get the best care available, he is also focused on ensuring that fewer – if any – families find themselves mourning a loss caused by cigarettes. The ban on smoking in public places is only a start for Europe's newly appointed Ryder Cup captain: next he wants to engineer a total ban on tobacco in Scotland, a campaign that got underway when he recently hosted a dinner with politicians like Nicola Sturgeon and Jim Murphy. "I've campaigned for a complete ban on cigarettes and would love to think we might move towards that, so I'll continue to lobby hard," he says.
"I see children in the streets smoking, and I want to go up to them to tell them that it doesn't look as cool as they think, to tell them what the lungs of a smoker look like. But things are changing: when I was a kid you could buy single cigarettes. Now smoking has become very expensive and socially unacceptable. Back in my mum's era, when everyone wanted to be like Katharine Hepburn, it was socially unacceptable not to smoke."
Yet such ambitious campaigns are in the future for Montgomerie. Just now he's contemplating what Mother's Day means to him. He thinks about his mother every day but today is one of three days of the year when he spends even more time than usual contemplating his loss. The other two are Christmas and the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth, which falls over his mother's birthday, on May 25. Since he won his first title there, on her birthday in 1998 – his caddy saying "Let's win this for Mum" before Montgomerie collected the unlikely 18th-hole birdie he needed for victory – he says he has developed a real bond with the tournament.
Montgomerie will not be obsessing about golf today. And tomorrow, when Mothering Sunday has run its course, he will get back to the task in hand – raising £3.2 million to make the Elizabeth Montgomerie Building a reality. "Of all the things I've achieved in sport," says the Scot, "this will be the one that means the most to me." r
Elizabeth Montgomerie Foundation (
www.elizabethmontgomerie.org)
The full article contains 2854 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
