Louise

St Andrews, Scotland

Meet Louise, the Carol Vorderman of golfing scoreboards. A number-lover with an infectious smile, she told me a bit about her role at the 2018 Senior’s Open Championship at St Andrews.

Your job here looks like an interesting one.

It is! I’m a volunteer and this is the main scoreboard, which gets seen on TV. All of us volunteers get some free gear- hats and jackets – in return for what we’re doing. I’m not a golfer. Everybody else I’m working with this afternoon is a golfer, but I like numbers. I’ve done a couple of other competitions where I’ve tried other things and said not for me. Then I went on the scoreboard, and now I never do anything else because I love it. We went through a period of time when there was never any cricket on TV, so I used to watch cricket on Teletext. This is like watching cricket on Teletext – you’re watching golf by the scoreboard. So I get a real buzz out of it. I do still go out and watch a bit of golf, but I would far rather be doing this. Last year at Valderrama, I literally put on the first score of the competition and the last score of the competition, and I never missed a beat! I was there for the whole time.

I'm not a golfer... but I like numbers.

When do the numbers get really exciting?

If you get a hole in one, that gets very exciting. When we get the eagles, we’re all shouting about those. And obviously we’re always commenting as we pick a score up off the printer.

How does it work? Do you each have a specific player you’re responsible for?

No. We’ve got a very democratic system going on – we just literally take it in turns. The scores come off and whosever turn it is takes that sheet of paper, gets all the numbers and pops them on the board. Then we check it periodically, because with the camera looking at it, we like to make sure that it’s right.

“I never missed a beat!”

Who are you rooting for in this competition? We’ve only got a couple of hours to go!

I would have said Langer. Yeah, because I watched him win it last year... on the scoreboard obviously! I put his final score on and put him on the leaderboard last year, so I’d really like him to do it.

Will it be your turn to put him on again?

Well, we’ll see. In that whole thing of democracy, it’s whoever’s turn it is next – we’ll see who’s got the sharpest elbows!