Robert Macintyre had a year to remember in 2023, with highlights including finishing runner-up to Rory McIlroy at the Genesis Scottish Open and claiming 2.5 points from three matches as Luke Donald’s European Ryder Cup team cruised to victory by 16.5 to 11.5 points over the US at Marco Simone. To cap it all, his DP World Tour form earned him a PGA Tour card for the 2024 season.
However, since then, it has not been plain sailing. MacIntyre will tee it up at the Genesis Scottish Open again in July, and, during a video call to discuss that he also opened up on his first four months as a PGA Tour player, where he admitted it has been "lonely" at times.
MacIntyre, who is in the field for this week’s inaugural Myrtle Beach Classic, said: “When you're on the DP World Tour, it's very friendly. Everyone is together. We're all traveling the world. If we're struggling with certain things, we speak to folk around us. Everything is very familiar.
“You come out here to the PGA Tour, and it's also so unfamiliar. There's less chatting. There's less dinners. There's just less of that big family feel that you get on the DP World Tour.”
MacIntyre also revealed that, because he doesn’t know many of the PGA Tour players as well as some on the DP World Tour, it’s made it a struggle to settle. He continued: “It's just simple things. Sitting in player dining, you do it in Europe and you've got all the Scottish boys, you've got all the British boys.
“A lot of the European guys, if you're sitting on your own, they will come and join you. Out here, because you don't know many folk. You don't know them in that same kind of depth, they don't come to sit with you. It does become a lonely place at the golf side of it.”
MacIntyre recently returned to hometown Oban for a visit and admitted it had been a relief. He said: “It's getting to spend time with people that treat you as Bob, the human, and not Bob the golfer.”
He then explained that the situation is simply the result of two different cultures. “I think that's the culture difference in America to Scotland,” he said: “We are very, very, very, very good at pulling each other down, whereas out here, it's very much prop them up, try to push them up in the limelight. It's just a different culture.”
Despite his struggles to settle on the PGA Tour, MacIntyre admitted it is an excellent place to ply his trade. He said: “It's a great place to play golf. It's obviously where the best players in the world are. It's where you can make more money. But, for me, it's all about work-life balance. I've not quite worked that out yet over here.
MacIntyre’s comments have striking similarities with those of former PGA Tour player Thomas Pieters, who, in 2022, described skipping The Players Championship to go skiing five years earlier as the “dumbest thing I’ve ever done” and also opened up about his struggles on the circuit.
Per Golf Digest, he said: “This is a lonely place for Europeans sometimes. Everybody has their cliques and travels with their families, which I get. I totally get. But I didn’t know anybody out here. I had nothing to look forward to after rounds. Just spending so many nights alone in a hotel room, so many dinners by myself.”
