He used to rope alligators by the snout on Alabama’s Blackwater River, his father once saved his life by shooting dead a rattlesnake and there are tales of a day at the county fair when he climbed into the ring with an orangutan. More than anyone at Loch Lomond this week, where an international field will assemble for the Barclays Scottish Open, Boo Weekley can claim to have come a long way.

The west of Scotland will be a far cry from the town where he grew up, “a dirt track, two gas stations, and a prison” on the stretch of coastline known as Florida’s “Redneck Riviera”, but the 33-year-old whose folksy eccentricities have earned him a cult following in the United States hopes to make himself at home. “I ain’t never been there but I’m told the pace of life is a bit slower. I like the sound of that. Where I come from, we don’t want to be in no hurry. We just take our time.”

It is the story of Weekley’s life. The graduate of Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College didn’t take the game seriously until he was 23. In 2002, his rookie season on the PGA Tour, he was so disorientated by life in the fast lane that he made only five cuts and quickly lost his card. “I had barely been in a plane before, and there I was, flying to LA and New York. I was lost in the big cities.”

Now, after four years in the wilderness, he has found his way on the PGA Tour. By tying for second at this year’s Honda Classic, where he missed a three-foot putt for the title, and winning the Verizon Heritage in April, Weekley has leapt to 47th in the world and thrust himself into the major championships, the next of which will be this month’s Open at Carnoustie. His year has resembled nothing so much as an audition for Tin Cup.

Weekley, though, is no film star in the making. Despite winning $1,816,335 in prize money this year, he still stays in cheap motels, and prefers to keep his earnings for a rainy day. “I don’t want to spend a hundred and something dollars on a hotel you only sleep and eat in,” he says. “It’s just not me. I don’t really believe in spending money. I got me a jet ski, and some toys for my boy, but that’s it. I have worked too hard to go and squander it.”

Weekley grew up hunting and fishing, worked in the searing heat of a Pensacola chemical plant, and contracted a skin disease from his grandfather’s cow, a complaint that has caused him to play most of his professional golf in waterproof trousers. Add to that the foot problem which, until recently, forced him to play in tennis shoes, and it is easy to see why the tobacco-chewing hillbilly whose nickname comes from Boo-Boo, Yogi bear’s sidekick, isn’t always taken seriously. “It don’t matter to me,” he says. “They can look at me any way they want. It’s like Ian Poulter. Some folks wouldn’t know who he was if he didn’t wear crazy clothes, but there ain’t nothing wrong with that. It’s all good.”

Weekley, whose real name is Thomas, would wear camouflage if he could. He tried to in 2002, but Tim Finchem, the PGA Tour commissioner, Tim Finchem, advised him in a letter that it was not an appropriate colour. “I could have taken him to court or something, but it wouldn’t have been worth it,” says the player who only wanted to help out one of his sponsors, Mossy Oak, a hunting company from Mississippi.

He is his own man. Ask him about the fight with an orangutan, and he says “no sir, no sir”, but as CBS analyst Gary McCord tells it, Weekley woke up an hour after trying to throw the first punch. The rattlesnake, meanwhile, was a foot and half from his right leg when his father took out the gun. “He picked me up in his arms and we started to cry,” says Boo.

His trip to Scotland is purely business. Apart from experiencing his second major championship, his only intention is to catch up with a few of his ancestors, and avoid black pudding. “I’ve been told not to go near anything that looks like a sausage,” he says. “I ain’t eating no fried blood.”

He knows nothing about the 1999 Open at Carnoustie, when some of the game’s biggest names were brought to their knees. He doesn’t watch golf and knows little about its history, and isn’t even passionate about playing it. “For me, this is a job, and as soon as it is over, I go home and find something better to do, like hunting and fishing. I just do this because the good Lord blessed me with a talent. I will take advantage of that while I can, but I don’t want to do this for the rest of my life. I don’t like being away all the time. I’m a home boy.”

Weekley is one of three PGA Tour players from the same high school. The one with whom he has most in common is Heath Slocum. “Boo’s always been different,” says Slocum. “He doesn’t change, which is one of the things I most admire about him. He didn’t change when he came out in 2002, and he hasn’t changed this year. He’s a guy you can’t not like.”

His other buddy from school is Bubba Watson, who also has a dodgy nickname. Watson’s father says he didn’t think his real name, Gerry, sounded right for so fat and ugly a baby. Weekley has different priorities to the big-hitting left-hander whose ambition is to win majors and play in the Ryder Cup. “I tell him he worries about the wrong things,” says Boo. “My only ambition is to play golf for another 10 years, and maybe earn a million and a half every year, enough to retire and buy myself some hunting land in Alabama. It would be fun, and an honour, to win majors and play in the Ryder Cup, but it ain’t gonna make or break me.”

Weekley’s honesty is a refreshing alternative to the psychobabble indulged in by most tournament professionals. He has no coach, no psychologist - “ain’t nothing that can’t be cured by a good rest” - and is accompanied on tour only by his caddie, Joe Pyland, to whom he has remained loyal since they were friends at school. “I don’t consider him to be my caddie,” says Weekley. “That’s just another word. He doesn’t call me his boss, and I don’t call him my caddie. We are in this together.”

Weekley’s good nature captured the imagination in this year’s Arnold Palmer Invitational, where he was guilty of a bizarre rules infringement. When his playingpartner, Tom Johnson, chipped from one section of the green to another, Weekley ran over to remove the flag so that his colleague could be spared a two-shot penalty. As it turned out, Weekley was given the punishment, for doing so without authorisation. “I didn’t want it to cost him nothing,” he explains.

The incident earned Weekley sympathy and admiration in equal measure. Mark Russell, the rules official who had the unfortunate task of breaking the news, said: “I’ve never heard of that in my 27 years in golf. Boo said he was just trying to help out. He knew if the ball hit the flagstick it was a penalty. I can’t tell you how impressed I was with the way he handled it.”

All of which stuff and nonsense has served to obscure the quality of his game, which is long and straight and true. One of the PGA Tour’s purest ball-strikers, he tied for 26th in this year’s US Open, and fancies his chances at Carnoustie, where the bump-and-runs he used to hit in the yard will come into their own. “We’ll win again this season,” promises Weekley, whose take on a complicated game is mercifully simple.

At Oakmont last month, he was paired with Watson, who talked afterwards about their shared approach to the tournament. “Me and him, we’re having the same pressures. He’s thinking the same thing I’m thinking.”

“Which is what?” asked a reporter.

“I don’t know,” replied Watson. “That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”