Bob MacIntyre bowled up a day late for the Open. He was supposed to be here early on Monday for a press conference, but had to change his plans at the last minute after his victory in the Scottish Open at the Renaissance Club in North Berwick.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to get to Troon,” he said that night. “I don’t think I’ll be legally able to drive.”
He isn’t a big drinker, but decided to make an exception on Sunday. He was last seen in the clubhouse bar some time in the early hours with one arm around his father, Dougie, and the other on a silver punchbowl filled to the brim with good scotch.
MacIntyre seemed in pretty good trim when he finally made it here. If a night on the lash seems a strange way to go about preparing for a major, well, as he says himself, life is too short to let moments like that pass without marking them. “When you’ve achieved a childhood dream, and you’ve got family and friends there who have backed you ever since you were a young kid, I think it was quite right to go absolutely wild.”
MacIntyre has worked too hard, worried too much, waited too long, and the win meant too much to him and his family. “I would do it all over again. It was just one of the great nights.”
It was his second win in his past six starts, after his victory in the Canadian Open early last month. Tommy Fleetwood (12th) is four places ahead of him in the world rankings, but given the form he is in, MacIntyre is the leading British contender this week. It has been 25 years since a Scot (Paul Lawrie) won the Open, it had been 25 years, too, since a Scot (Colin Montgomerie) won the Scottish Open, until he did it.
MacIntyre grew up 70 or so miles up the coast in Oban, where his father is the greenskeeper at Glencruitten. He recently moved back to the UK after a six-month stretch in the US, which, he finally decided, did not really suit him.
MacIntyre, 28in August, learned a lot about himself while he was abroad. He can tell you, to the very minute, when things finally clicked for him. It was in May, when he was playing in the Myrtle Beach Classic. He had just made a birdie at the first hole on Sunday and moved up to two shots off the lead as he chased his first win on the PGA Tour.
“Everything’s great,” he told himself as he hit his tee shot straight down the middle of the second fairway and then, all of a sudden, it really wasn’t. He blew his second shot way left, hacked out of the rough and took three putts to get in.
“Then I started thinking ‘the tournament’s gone’ and the minute you do that your emotions are all over the place. You lose all control of yourself, your thought process, your touch, everything, it’s all gone.” He finished in a tie for 13th.
The left-hander spent the next few days chewing it all over and finally decided what had gone wrong. “What happened at Myrtle Beach taught me not to try and win golf tournaments.”
Which sounds a pretty strange way to go about things when you make a living trying to do exactly that. But those who know MacIntyre say he is the sort who was always overthinking things. At the PGA Championship the next week, his only ambition was to avoid getting ahead of himself – “just stay in the fight, and stay calm”. He played pretty poorly despite it, until an eagle on the 72nd hole lifted him into eighth place.
“That was a real light switch that made me think, ‘you know what, the golf game isn’t the problem, I’m the problem’.” Call it the Dao of Bob. “There’s no magic recipe to it,” he says. “I just stay out of my own way.”
Since he stopped worrying, he has started winning. He had been dreaming about winning the Scottish Open for as long as he can remember and had been robbed of it when Rory McIlroy beat him with back-to-back birdies on the last two holes in 2023. This time around he found he felt “as relaxed as I’ve ever been for a golf tournament, no nerves, nothing, I was just trying to enjoy myself”.
Nothing has changed for this week. “It’s the exact same again, I’m very relaxed. I’m enjoying time with friends and family back at the house when I’m not on the course and I’m enjoying time with my team when I’m on the course.
“On the first tee we’ll start off from level par. I’ve got as much chance as everyone else in the field. Same as it was last week. It’s just about getting in that position and seeing where the cards fall. Hopefully, come Sunday, I’ve got a chance and that’s all I want.”
