A thirty-year journey towards the exalted status of PGA Master Professional took Michael Braidwood from his native Scotland to as far away as Bahrain, Russia and Qatar – but ended when he could barely take a step at all.

It was the lockdown imposed as a result of the COVID pandemic that prompted the general manager at Education City Golf Club, in Doha, Qatar, to continue the process having attained Advanced Fellow Status with the PGA eight years ago.

“It’s quite a long process of gathering all the evidence and documentation, so I suppose that’s one good thing that came out of COVID, it gave me time to do that, update my submissions and things like that,” he said. “It was nice to get it through.

“I first applied back in 2012 and got awarded Advanced Fellow status. So I kind of said to myself, I’ll leave it a few more years and do a few more things and add some further strings to my bow and reapply round about now.

“That was really my plan, and that’s what I did and all the evidence I’d submitted of all the different things I’d done in the industry, although it was through people management as well as club management, obviously added up in the eyes of the panel, so they awarded me a Master Professional.”

His current position is a long way, both metaphorically as well as geographically, from his first job in professional golf, as assistant to Kevin Stables at Montrose Golf Links back in 1990. But he credits his first boss with having helped him on a path that would lead him into golf management.

“I had dabbled in a pro shop one summer a couple of years before that, but then decided I wanted to play a bit more and I got a real job in a bank for a while, and I hated it, so it lured me back into golf,” recalled Braidwood.

“It was great to work for Kevin, who was a really superb player, one of the best players on the domestic circuit in Scotland. He was also involved on PGA committees and things like that, so I learned a lot from him, and because he played a lot and travelled a lot he trusted me with running the shop and the business, which gave me probably more experience than other assistant pros would get.

“Again, because of his playing commitments he didn’t teach too much so I got to teach a lot. That gave me really good grounding and I got exposed to a lot in a short period of time working with Kevin. He’s a great guy and still a really good friend, and it was a positive start to my career.”

It was such an impressive grounding that Braidwood’s next career move took him to one of Scotland’s most prestigious golfing venues, Gleneagles, where he played a big part in establishing a new golfing academy, one of the first of its kind back in the mid-1990s.

Braidwood explains: “The hotel had taken the golf shop in-house and they decided to really try to leverage the lessons side of the business for hotel guests, corporate groups and such like, so I joined under the new head professional Greg Schofield with the responsibility to set up the new golf academy, so again that was tremendous experience.

“They were probably among the first in the country to use video technology and a lot of teaching aids and such like, and the key thing at Gleneagles was we weren’t afraid to charge, so we were charging top dollar for a high-quality experience for the guests. I learned a huge amount there again in a short space of time.

“The other opportunity was to learn about some of the operations within the hotel, so I was forever volunteering to cross-train or do some different things in different departments just to gain a bigger understanding of how the hospitality industry works.”

He says at the time he was “hell-bent on being the next David Leadbetter”, but bosses at Gleneagles had spotted his flair for management and he undertook a project in Bahrain at one of their facilities, the Royal Golf Club, where he assisted in the development of Bahrain’s first 18-hole championship standard golf course and golf club.

He was off in a new direction whose route saw him pass through Moscow while working as operations director for Braemar Golf, a post that had allowed he and wife Judy to return to Scotland so that children Ben and Hannah could go to secondary school in Scotland.

“Braemar Golf had offices in St Andrews, which is close to where I grew up, and so it worked really well,” said Braidwood, who later volunteered to pack his bags and head east for six months as Braemar’s interim general manager in Russia after a would-be recruit changed his mind.

“Russia was great and I really enjoyed it. I tried really hard to learn Russian and I was reasonably successful at it, but if you’re going to work in a foreign country where English is not the main business language – the Middle East is easy because everyone speaks English here – but it’s very hard to be an effective manager if you’re having to do it through a translator.

“It’s very challenging and I also find the Russian style, which is almost blame and punishment, doesn’t go down with my ethos of nurturing talent and developing people, so I kind of said, ‘Look, my values don’t align with the company I’m working for here and I’m not as effective as I should be because I don’t speak Russian’ so that helped my decision.

“But I found it a fascinating country, I found it really exciting. Russia probably doesn’t sit on many people’s golfing bucket lists, but it should because there are some great golf courses there.”

He is about to start his fourth year at Education City Golf Club and is both proud at the progress being made and encouraged at the response from the Qatari populace to the club’s aim of providing world-class facilities that will enable the beginner to graduate to playing on a championship course via intermediary steps at their academy and on their six-hole and par-3 courses.

“We’re starting, slowly but surely, to get more Qataris into the sport,” he added. “We’re doing well with getting kids and more Qatari people playing. So far, so good. It’s going in the right direction.

“COVID was like a sledgehammer hitting us. But because of travel restrictions in and out of the country here, people aren’t going on their usual holidays, and we’ve never been busier,” he said.

“When we reopened we doubled the number of our memberships in the space of a couple of months. Okay, we’re a new facility and we’ve only been open for 18 months, but as regard volume of rounds, July has been our busiest, which is great.

“Once we get into September and October when our season starts off again after the hot summer, we aim to get people to become what I classify as real golfers.

“What I mean by that,” clarifies Braidwood, “are golfers who are going out on the golf course, getting themselves a handicap and becoming competitive. When that happens, then I think we’ve got them hooked on golf for life.”