The PGA Tour is the dream, right? This golfer still feels drawn to his Scotland home

OBAN, Scotland — You are born into a world surrounded by wonder, walking out the back door of the greenskeeper’s house, your home, to look up at the mountainous 12th fairway hoping someday to make that climb. You go into town peering at the horseshoe-shaped Oban Bay protected by the mounds of the island of Kerrera, just shy of the Isle of Mull. Awe is your norm. Beauty is your base. So no matter how far you rise, how much your gift takes you to each corner of the world and provides you with a lavish lifestyle and mind-boggling opportunities, it just doesn’t quite feel right. You crave normal. Your normal.

You win tournaments in Cyprus and Italy. You play in a Ryder Cup. You make the PGA Tour. The great game takes you places, and it feels appropriate to commit to your future by moving to Florida. There comes a point in many lives when you have to choose whether home is who you are or home is what propels you to your potential.

You contend for a PGA Championship. Two weeks later you win your first PGA Tour event. Your life is becoming everything you dreamed.

But you aren’t happy.

You long for the Glencruitten Golf Club clubhouse, the cozy little one-story shack in Oban where a reporter can walk in to find eight men leaning back in a semicircle of chairs, pints in hand at noon on a Tuesday, looking up with a smirk as they’re asked if they know Bob Macintyre.

“Bob who?” a white-haired man asks with a straight face.

Bob Macintyre. The pride of Scottish golf. The 27-year-old lefty developing into one of the better golfers in the world.

“Who’s he?” the man asks again.

Neil Armour maintains the stare until he pulls up his phone which already has a photo of the boyish, soft-featured Macintyre in a sleek, well-tailored suit sitting in the Royal Box at Wimbledon the day before. They’re passing the phone around chuckling the way dear friends and family really do when humbling a member of the tribe who’s made it big. Yes, they know Macintyre all too well. These are the men who watched Bob, Dougie the greenskeeper’s son, grow up at Glencruitten. They watched him learn the game “as a wee lad” playing Glencruitten’s back four holes on the other side of the road on a constant loop until Dougie felt he was ready for the rest. They saw him hit a hole-in-one by age 12 and win the local junior tournament four years in a row. They drove him to tournaments and some helped out financially when it was necessary. They play shinty with him at Oban Celtic and clamor for his mother Carol’s scones.

“Aye, he’s a great boy,” Neil MacDougall says. “Well grounded. Nice young lad.”

This is why Bob Macintyre isn’t happy. He’s living in Orlando. He’s a member at the prestigious Isleworth Golf and Country Club. He’s made $3 million the last seven months alone. But it’s just different. It’s less communal. In America, the pros travel in teams with their swing coach, physiotherapist, psychologist, manager and so on. It’s a business. Whereas coming up in Europe they’d travel with other pros spending evenings learning about each other’s lives most nights over lunch in the clubhouse or dinner and drinks. He admits he and his girlfriend, Shannon, feel lonely.

He goes back home whenever he can, spending three weeks back in Oban before his breakthrough win at the Canadian Open in June. Instead of taking that victory into the signature event, the Memorial, he flew right back home the next week for a party.

This week, Macintyre plays the Scottish Open in North Berwick before heading to Royal Troon for an Open Championship in Scotland. So as Macintyre finds himself torn between the two parallel paths of who he truly is — as he tries to decide where he wants to spend his life —  I felt compelled to drive from Edinburgh to this little fishing town on the western coast of Scotland to find out why this 8,000-person town has such a hold on the man. We learned something about home.

“I just find I get brought back down-to-earth …,” Macintyre says. “When I go back to Oban, I get treated as Bob, one of the boys, not Robert Macintyre, the golfer. I think that’s the way it should be.”

The moment has gone viral now — you’ve surely seen it — but watch it again, specifically the minute before the microphone goes to Dougie Macintyre. He hovered a few feet away from his son, slowly scanning his head around the scene in Hamilton, Ontario. He had a look of awe, taking in his son’s first PGA Tour victory while carrying his clubs. Macintyre needed a caddie for just the Canadian Open. Most caddies didn’t want a one-week gig, so he called his father up in Oban. Dougie hopped on a flight to Ottawa. Five days later they were victors. Together.

As CBS reporter Amanda Balionis motioned toward Dougie to ask him a question, he seemed to slightly back away. He’s not a talker. But Dougie was, whether he liked it or not, the story of the week. Maybe even more than his son. She went to the other side and cornered him. He could hardly get the words out.

“Unbelievable. I’m a grass-cutter,” Dougie said, pausing to turn and hold back tears with Bob lovingly patting his head. “Not a caddie. Not a caddie. Honestly, it’s unbelievable.”

Back home, they were packed into the clubhouse watching and cheering. They knew how surreal this was for Dougie, who is more than a grass-cutter. They knew how special. Dougie was an athlete, a great shinty player but good at soccer and golf too. He didn’t have the finances to chase it. He became a greenskeeper at Glencruitten and raised four kids in the house by the 12th hole and brought in foster kids too. Bob’s two older sisters were skilled horse riders, and they also made sacrifices to give Bob the opportunity. Bob was the one with the opportunity to do more, and Dougie coached him.

“He was the only one,” Armour said. “You’ll hear other people say they coached Bob but they didn’t. Bob’s dad coached him.”

On this Tuesday, Dougie was on the mower cutting the grass on an ugly day of Scottish weather. The course is a beast, a short but absurdly hilly 18 holes of steep inclines and tight fairways. “You can see how Bob got so good,” club captain Kenny Devine said. They only have three mowers and the equipment is in need of updating. Dougie doesn’t complain. He hopped off the mower as he saw a stranger approaching. He’s used to reporters being here by now, but he’s not used to it.

He turned red only to smile and say in the sweetest way possible, “No, no, I don’t do interviews. Feel free to talk to anyone. I just don’t… yeah …  I’m sorry.”

Dougie and Carol raised their kids to be humble. Macintyre wasn’t able to play much junior golf because they couldn’t afford it. Members took turns driving him to the events he could play and some carried his bag. Raising a golfer was a communal endeavor, but it meant they were all part of it.

James Forgrieve was a great golfer here in his own right and a prominent figure in the area. When asked what a young Macintyre was like, he dryly quipped, “Oh, a cheeky —” before laughing and correcting himself. “No no, always a very quiet lad.”

“James was really supportive to Bob and all the juniors,” his nephew Duncan Forgrieve said. “When Bob was coming through and maybe things weren’t so good, a lot of people helped him in various ways and James is in that category.”

It’s not the norm for a golfer to take this much pride in their home. They might get announced by the starter as from their town or speak fondly of it, but they all tend to live in Florida or Arizona now. Few feel as intertwined with home as Macintyre. It’s at the core of his identity — Bob from Oban — and it works both ways. Macintyre has helped put the place on the map. It’s a little resort town, a stop for tourists on their way to the isles to the northwest. It has a strong fishing industry and beautiful sites like McCaig’s Tower, which is made of Bonawe granite and overlooks the city and bay. Suddenly it boasts itself as “The Home of Robert Macintyre,” with signs throughout the town. People come to Glencruitten just to play his home course. Scotland is known for golf, but at its core Oban is more of a shinty town. It’s a physical, intense game. Duncan described it as “hockey without the rules,” and Macintyre still plays for Oban Celtic. He learned not to keep jewelry on a few years ago when it got caught and nearly took off his finger.

“Aye, very good. Very good,” Duncan said. “He’s strong and determined. Resourceful.”

“And hot tempered!” another man shouted across the bar.

These are Macintyre’s people. When he earned the final automatic qualifying spot for the 2023 Ryder Cup, he flew 15-20 of them to Rome and set them up in a villa. Instead of flying back privately like most of his peers would, he switched to a commercial flight and flew home with the crew. When they returned, Macintyre went from school to school in the area with the cup to speak and show the kids. That night, they had a party “busting at the seams” at Glencruitten with a band playing and everybody posing for pictures, Macintyre happily smiling the whole night.

“It was a good west coast cèilidh,” Duncan said.

But as Macintyre left Oban this year to play full time on the PGA Tour in America for the first time, the homesickness didn’t go away. He went back and forth as much as he could. He clarified he wasn’t having severe mental health issues, but “I just didn’t have my mojo.” It always took returning to Oban to spark his game. One couldn’t help but wonder if it was sustainable.

“He still has wee spells,” James said. “If he hasn’t got the girlfriend there or something, he’s a bit of a loner. He’s a social guy, but he’s a loner at times. The thing he looks forward to is getting home.”

Here he is, back in Scotland at his national open, sitting down in an argyle hat to represent a local foundation and ready to speak to a bunch of reporters. He sees a collection of veteran Scottish reporters in the front row. “There he is,” he says to one with a smile. He’s comfortable here.

He talks about going back home again recently, how when he’s home he doesn’t pick up a club and doesn’t go out much at all. He just sinks into the normalcy of home, eating some of Carol’s baking (after one of his first wins he bought his mother a new kitchen) and having lunch with the guys at Glencruitten.

But he’s asked about Florida. About how he balances trying to make Florida a new home while staying connected to the place that made him.

“My rent is up I think about the end of August, and I don’t think I’ll be getting it renewed to be honest,” Macintyre says. “Scotland is my home, and yeah, I’ve joined Isleworth. That will always be a place I go and practice in the wintertime but there’s nothing like home. Scotland, this is where I want to be.”

Glencruitten Golf Club in Oban, Scotland. (Brody Miller / The Athletic)

He’s staying on the PGA Tour. His move back won’t change his professional career. He’ll maybe rent a house in Florida during winter months so he can practice more but deep down, it’s not home and he doesn’t think it ever will be.

In this decision, Macintyre found the path in between. Home can be the place that holds you back. Comfort builds confidence, but comfort can also stop you from expanding into who you’re meant to be. Macintyre took the risk. He left home and tried to take the leap into becoming an elite golfer. In reality, home was never holding Macintyre back. Oban, Glencruitten and all the people in between? They were the ones who got him here. They’re the ones pushing him forward.

So before I made the drive back to Edinburgh, I walked the course that made Bob Macintyre. It was grueling but beautiful, a green canvas filled with daunting hills and challenging approach shots. Two Oban men were walking up the 12th fairway that feels like it’s on a 100-yard incline. “This is the hole Bob learned to play golf on!” Declan Curran said. They explained how it’s a course of choices, with risks and rewards based on figuring out how to play the wind and the elevation.

Bob Macintyre grew up learning how to make the choices in order to become a great golfer. This time, he chose Oban.

(Top photo: Andrew Redington / Getty Images)