Lawrie tells teenage sons they won't be coming to Ryder Cup at Medinah

GLENEAGLES Scotland -- Paul Lawrie has told his two teenage sons that they will not be travelling with him to the Ryder Cup.

The 43-year-old Scot has made it back onto Europe's team 13 years after his debut -- the second-longest gap in the event's history -- and cannot wait for the action to start in Chicago the last weekend in September. But Lawrie said that he and his wife Marian will make the trip alone.

Both 17-year-old Craig and 13-year-old Michael are promising golfers and Craig even caddied for his father in last month's Scottish Open at Castle Stuart. He is soon to start a golf management degree in Dornoch, Scotland, while Michael is about to return to school near their Aberdeen home.

"For me it's not an environment for a 13-year-old boy to be at," Lawrie said of the Ryder Cup.

"We both felt it's so busy, you're not going to see anything and if Marian is walking (inside the ropes) with another wife, who's going to look after the boys behind the ropes?," he explained on Tuesday. "I think they were both expecting that they were going to be coming, but they're nae!

"Michael said, 'I assume we are coming' and Marian said 'No, you're going to stay at home and watch it on telly'. I think he was a wee bit disappointed."

One of Lawrie's goals now is to keep his Ryder Cup place for 2014 and have his boys watch him when Scotland hosts the match for only the second time at Gleneagles, the venue for this week's Johnnie Walker Championship.

Of the nine players certain to be part of Europe's side, Lawrie and Italian Francesco Molinari are the only two at Gleneagles and, perhaps not surprisingly, they have been paired together for the opening two rounds on Thursday and Friday.

Captain Jose Maria Olazabal will play with Darren Clarke, named last week as one of his assistants, while Thomas Bjorn, another of the backroom team, will be alongside Belgian Nicolas Colsaerts, the only player in the field who can still force himself into an automatic spot.

The only player to have waited longer than Lawrie to return to the Ryder Cup was Christy O'Connor Jr. He played in 1975 and 1989.