Robert MacIntyre will fight this Sunday for his first victory in the PGA Tour and the fourth of his career. He will start as the sole leader of the RBC Canadian Open with 18 holes left and a four-stroke lead over Ben Griffin, Mackenzie Hughes and Ryan Fox. He has created a great opportunity on a strange Saturday round where he had two luxury collaborators, as the Scotsman confessed.
The first and most important is his father, Dougie, who is acting as a caddie this week. Things were not going well after hole 9. He was one over par and had lost ground and the lead. MacIntyre admitted he was somewhat lost after making two consecutive bogeys on holes 8 and 9. His head was getting away from him and his father brought him back to reality with a short, to-the-point phrase. Pure sense and common sense.
“He mocked me as I walked from the 10th hole tee to the fairway. He loves the sport, he loves to compete, he knows how to win and he knows how to lose. He’s been through it all. He could see that my head was going a bit and he said to me: ‘What have you been working on for the last eight weeks, ten weeks, whatever you’ve been doing?’ It was like a kind of reality check. That’s when I realised what the problem was. I got into that mode and tried to find the positive in everything,” MacIntyre said.
He found the positive even when a bad ball ended up in a chop. It was on the 11th hole fairway, after hitting a good tee shot. “Instead of complaining and feeling sorry for myself, I said to myself: ‘You know what? That chop is going to allow me to hit a 6 iron, a cut 6. If I hadn’t been in that chop, I wouldn’t have hit this shot. So I tried to turn the negative into positive,” he explained. “I started to gain momentum. I made a long putt and then everything started to roll.” He signed a five-under par in the last nine.
On the other hand, although he opted for mystery, he gave a lot of credit to Justin Rose, his dance partner at the Italy Ryder Cup just over eight months ago. “I learned quite a bit in Rome. They told me a couple of things there and, obviously, from my playing partner Justin Rose, a man who has done everything in golf. Much respect for him, especially for how he behaved as a partner and for being shoulder to shoulder fighting for the same cause. He has given me something I will never forget and tomorrow I will try to put it into practice and play as well as possible. Then, the result will be the result,” he explained.
And what is that he gave him? “I’m sorry, I’m not going to say it…”
