PAUL LAWRIE, his coach Adam Hunter and caddie Paddy Byrne had been fooling around in the locker room with the Claret Jug, the flag from the 18th green and a camera when they spilled out of the Carnoustie Golf Hotel. As they made their way along the street, silverware in hand, towards the players’ car park, two men he describes as “the worse for wear” brushed by them on the pavement. The pair were about five yards past when they stopped, looked back at the merry entourage and then at each other. “Nah,” they said, before shaking their heads and stumbling off into the night.

“They probably thought they had drunk too much,” says Lawrie, who could not quite believe it himself. He had, after all, just come from 10 shots back on the final day to win the 1999 Open Championship. His odds that morning were 80-1, but a 67 took him into a playoff with Jean Van de Velde and Justin Leonard, the last two holes of which he birdied. The Aberdonian, ranked 159 in the world, had become the first qualifier to win the game’s most prestigious prize since prequalifying had been introduced in 1962.

As Lawrie prepares for an emotional return to Carnoustie this week, he still finds himself having to defend a victory frequently dismissed as the random outcome of a freakish tournament. They say he didn’t so much win the trophy as receive it on a plate, courtesy of Van de Velde’s antics at the 72nd hole, where the Frenchman required only a double-bogey to win but somehow contrived to run up a seven. The course, it is added, was so brutally set up, with narrow fairways and knee-high rough, that it made a lottery of the championship. Davis Love III, one of those who took exception to what became known as Carnasty, said it ended up with the winner it deserved.

“It bothered me for a long time,” admits Lawrie. “I had a spell when I tried to mention it to journalists. I was saying, ‘Listen, for God’s sake guys, I won The Open’. But I realised one day you’re wasting your time. You are never going to change the way people see it. The Claret Jug sits in my home, which is all that matters. My kids can look at it any time they want. His kids can’t.”

Lawrie earned the privilege. What is often forgotten amid the recollections of perhaps the most bizarre Open in history is that nobody had played Carnoustie more than he. At least 20 previous appearances there included a Tartan Tour victory in 1990, so the player who drove down from Aberdeen every day had the benefit of local knowledge. He also had an aptitude for seaside golf, as his tie for sixth in the 1993 Open demonstrated.

While it would be exaggerating to claim he should have been among the favourites, once the weather had taken an already punishing course over the edge, some of the field’s more familiar faces were removed from the equation. “I kind of fancied my chances. My game was in good shape, the course was clearly very difficult and a lot of the players were very negative, arguing about the way it was set up. But the way I saw it, that was what we had to play and there was nothing we could do.”

Lawrie also knew how to win, having done it twice already on the European Tour. In the playoff some say should never have happened, he birdied his last two holes, most significantly the 17th, where he split the fairway with a two iron, struck a four iron to 15 feet and holed the putt. “That was when I knew I’d win,” he says. “It’s never over until it’s over, but I can remember thinking to myself as I walked to the last tee, ‘I am The Open champion’.”

On the 18th, he found the middle of the fairway with a three wood, and from 221 yards out, under no less pressure than Van de Velde earlier, produced the shot of his life, a four iron to within four feet of the flag. “I won that playoff by three shots, which is quite a big margin really. The events which led to it in the first place are what people remember, but finishing off tournaments is a big part of golf, and I did that.”