Renton Laidlaw, writer and broadcaster who graced the game of golf for nearly 60 years – obituary

Renton Laidlaw, who has died aged 82 after contracting Covid-19, was a broadcaster and journalist who for many years was one of the leading voices of the BBC’s golf coverage; with his gravelly but warm voice, his brisk but affable manner and his unassuming air of authority, he reported on 165 majors over the decades, including 58 Open Championships and 42 US Masters, as well as 15 Ryder Cups.

Harry Renton Laidlaw was born on July 6 1939 in Morningside, a suburb of Edinburgh, to Henry Laidlaw, an accountant who made extra money through freelance reporting, and Margaret, née Raiker; he attended Daniel Stewart’s College in the city, but got himself a Saturday job as a copytaker on The Pink sports paper in his home city, collating the incoming results.

When he told his headmaster he wanted to be a journalist, the head replied: “Why don’t you go and think about that, as it would be safer to become a banker or work for an insurance company?”

Three weeks later he asked the boy again, got the same reply, and helped him to secure a job offer from The Scotsman, though instead young Laidlaw joined the Edinburgh Evening News, where he already knew some of the journalists. He spent five years there as a junior reporter, then in 1957 the sports editor asked him if he would like to be the paper’s golf reporter.

“When he asked if I was ready to start, I was expecting him to say it would be the following week, but he said, ‘get your coat, we are going down to Prestonfield for an East of Scotland Alliance event.’ He told me to ask for the secretary, as he’d look after me, and my first writing assignment was to file 150 words at 12.15 that day.”

After that baptism of fire he did the job for 10 years – his first Open Championship was in 1959. It was probably the best time in the history of golf for a young journalist trying to make his name, with the “Big Three” of Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Gary Player beginning to establish their dominance, and Laidlaw was often heard to say: “I was lucky enough to come along at the right time.”

In 1968 he moved into television, as a news presenter and reporter for Grampian in Aberdeen. He did two years (1970-72) as a BBC news anchor in Edinburgh, then in 1973 he began his 25-year stint as golf correspondent for the London Evening Standard , combining it from 1976 until 1990 with the same job at the BBC.

He became as popular with the golfers as he was with viewers and readers. He was close to the “Big Three”, as well as other stars such as Lee Trevino, Tony Jacklin, Seve Ballesteros and Nick Faldo, and his fellow Scots Sandy Lyle, Sam Torrance and Colin Montgomerie. When the South African player Ernie Els was trying to establish himself on the European circuit, he and his wife Leizl lived in Renton’s cottage at Sunningdale.

In the 1980s Laidlaw presented BBC Radio’s Sport on 2, and in 1989 he became a full-time broadcaster with British Satellite Broadcasting, which was then taken over by Sky TV. From 1995 until 2016 he was a presenter on the Golf Channel in the US – and in 2013 he became the first non-American golf journalist to cover 40 Masters.

Though he was never able to wrestle his handicap below 12 – the 1979 Masters champion Fuzzy Zoeller advised him to stick to dominos – he did get to play rounds with Seve Ballesteros, and he was a member of the R & A, as well as clubs that included Wentworth and Sunningdale down south and Royal Burgess and Caledonian north of the border.

He received the Jack Nicklaus Memorial Award for golfing journalism and lifetime achievement awards from the Professional Golfers’ Association and its American and European equivalents.

He was a stalwart of the Association of Golf Writers, serving successively between 1978 and 2015 as secretary, chairman and president; he would open every annual dinner – always held on the Tuesday before the start of that year’s Open – with Robbie Burns’s Selkirk Grace: “Some hae meat and canna eat, And some wad eat that want it, But we hae meat and we can eat, Sae let the Lord be Thankit!”

He wrote several books, including four about the Ryder Cup, and was editor of the R&A’s Golfer’s Handbook, “the golfer’s Bible”.

Known universally as a kind and considerate man, Renton Laidlaw, who was unmarried and had no children, retired in 2015, and in his final years lived with his sister in Drumoig, a few miles up the road from St Andrews, the spiritual home of the sport he graced for nearly 60 years.

Renton Laidlaw, born July 6 1939, died October 12 2021