He’s got £4m in the bank and the golf world at his feet… all thanks to his greenkeeper father (and occasional caddie) who set him on a path to glory

A few yards from the house where Robert MacIntyre grew up sits the tee for the toughest hole on the Glencruitten golf course.

As a boy at primary school, he liked to think of it as his back garden.

For serious players, it’s a long par four with a blind second shot up a punishing hill to a plateau where pine trees guard a narrow green.

Even the best ones usually play for a bogey five.

For the youngster whacking away with a set of children’s clubs, the notorious 12th must have felt like golf’s most daunting challenge.

Yet, with his father Dougie by his side, Robert faced it nightly.

It was here and on the next three holes they would play together, rain or shine, after he finished school in Oban – and here that his father would shape the youngster’s game, teaching him how to grip the club and helping him develop and fine-tune his swing.

The boy trusted him implicitly. Dad had, after all, won his share of silverware at Glencruitten Golf Club.

He was head greenkeeper too. Under his tutelage, Robert would become rather good at the game.

Beating his father for the first time over their four-hole mini-round was a huge milestone.

Turning pro shortly after his 21st birthday was another.

Six years later, Dougie MacIntyre must have imagined that offering golf advice to his son was above his pay grade.

Robert was on the US PGA Tour now and had a professional swing coach.

He was one of the best left-handed players in the game, a Ryder Cup winner and, last year at the Scottish Open, lost by a single shot to former world number one Rory McIlroy.

Yet it was his father that MacIntyre called in a moment of crisis two weekends ago. ‘If in doubt, phone Dad,’ he reflected a little later, a huge grin on his face.

The extraordinary events of the intervening days have touched the hearts of golf fans across the globe.

For, when the distress call came, the father who first put a golf club in his son’s hands dropped everything to fly off and caddie for him at the Canadian Open.

And, of course, MacIntyre went on to win it with a tiddler putt on the 18th green – his father once again by his side.

The prize-money was huge – £1.3million. His father’s share will take care of the rest of his mortgage.

And yet the bigger gift, perhaps, was to the game of golf. Together, MacIntyres junior and senior gave a glorious affirmation of the family bonds which underlie the sport.

It is, after all, normally parents who oversee their children’s first tentative swings of a club. In their teens, the youngsters often join their mother or father’s local club.

They play together into adulthood and experience bittersweet emotions as the parents’ tee-shots become shorter and the next generation’s ones longer.

All this was true of the MacIntyres, which, no doubt, is what made victory at the Hamilton Golf Club in Ontario so sweet.

Both wept with joy after that winning putt went in the hole.

‘Unbelievable,’ said Dad, when a microphone was directed at him. ‘I’m a grass cutter.’

The truth, as he surely knew, was he was the key architect of his son’s success.

That call had come from Dallas where MacIntyre had just missed the cut at the Charles Schwab Challenge, meaning he was out of the tournament two days earlier than he had hoped.

He parted company from his caddie – his fourth in 18 months – and was struggling to recruit another in time for Canada.

And so, two Saturdays ago, he made a FaceTime call to his father.

How would Dad like to get on a plane and caddie for him at the Canadian Open?

‘I’m sitting on the couch at home, 8 o’clock on Saturday night, and I’m like, “Can I leave my job here?”’, his father recalled.

Outside the window was the golf course where his son’s journey began two decades earlier.

Now the 27-year-old was on another continent and, in golfing parlance, in the deep rough.

As naturally as he would cross the fairway to help his son find a lost ball, 59-year-old Mr MacIntyre crossed the Atlantic to help him find his game.

He was on a plane out of Scotland at 8 o’clock the next morning.

But the pair were not out of the woods yet.

When he arrived in Toronto the golfer’s stand-in caddie discovered he would need a work visa before he could step on to the course with his son.

That meant the two of them flying to Ottawa the following day and it was the next night before they arrived back.

Ultimately they had time for just nine holes of practice before the tournament began, which meant that neither one was well acquainted with the course.

Nor did it help that Mr MacIntyre Snr lost his yardage book.

Hopes were far from high, then, when the young Scot teed off on his first round of the four-day tournament.

And yet, with his original mentor back in situ, things began to click.

‘He’s been through thick and thin with me,’ explained MacIntyre after opening up a four-shot lead.

‘He taught me how to play the game of golf until I started working with a coach probably at about 14, 15.

‘It was just me and him, my family going round four holes at Glencruitten Golf Club out the back of my house for many years.’

Those mini-rounds with his father were a balm to the days at school, which he hated.

The golf was almost as enjoyable for him as shinty – his true favourite sport – which he continued to play competitively long after his exceptional golfing talent became evident.

‘It’s a cross between field hockey and legalised violence,’ he is fond of saying.

Even today, when playing overseas, he packs two shinty sticks along with his golf clubs – more, perhaps, as a reminder of his roots than in expectation of getting a game with them.

Home and family, it seems, were everything to the young golfer as he began spreading his wings, and still are.

Despite having three children of their own, his father and mother Carol decided to become foster parents and young Robert grew close to all the children welcomed into his house over the years.

Some he played golf with; others shinty. Sometimes it was hide and seek or knock-knock.

He told one interviewer: ‘The kids generally come from a variety of backgrounds. Some have been battered. Some are just neglected. Some have been abused.’

Spending time with them clearly helped ground him.

Recalling a disappointing showing at the Dunhill Links Championship in St Andrews, he said: ‘I was raging at my poor finish.

But once I was in the car heading home, I was fine. My dad was driving. And [foster brother] Dan was there. He didn’t care what I shot.

Ten minutes into the journey, we were singing songs.’

When, in his teens, MacIntyre won a scholarship at McNeese State University in Louisiana, he missed home dreadfully and cut his time there short after 18 months. 

He later reflected: ‘There’s a reason why I live here and probably will do for the rest of my life. I was an 18-year-old kid from a small town in Scotland, still living with my parents when I went there to college.

‘I just managed to learn how to cook and learn how to do my washing and I think that’s a massive part of learning how to play professional golf as well.’

He added: ‘I think I’ve done the right thing in coming home and chasing my dream quicker.’

Back home, he invested in a modest Oban flat with a sea view and dodgy mobile reception.

All the better, he thought, for shutting out the world, enjoying the vista and gaming on his PlayStation.

Indeed, despite a fortune now approaching £4million, there appears to have been little in the way of lavish expenditure for the rising star.

He drives a sensible BMW and holidays, it seems, are largely enjoyed at home.

If he hadn’t made it in golf, he once said, he would probably have become a local tradesman.

Last year, after finishing second in the Scottish Open and helping Europe win the Ryder Cup, the chance came to move from the European tour to the American one, where the prize money climbs steeply. He wrestled with the decision for several weeks.

‘It’s just working out where’s best to go,’ he told The Times last year.

‘Realistically, it is not about me, it’s about my family. Where’s best for them to get to as quickly as possible? Because I struggle to be away on my own for a long period of time.

‘What’s more important, work or life?’

He added: ‘I don’t know if I’m willing to sacrifice everything I need to sacrifice to achieve what I know I want to achieve in golf. I don’t know if life comes before my golf.’

For now, he chose golf, and based himself in Orlando, Florida, with his girlfriend Shannon Hartley.

It felt a long way from living the dream, at least in the early days, as he missed cuts and missed home.

In early April, having failed to qualify for the Masters, he flew home for three weeks and barely touched a golf club.

‘Done some stupid stuff and just enjoyed myself,’ was how he described his time in Oban.

He added: ‘It’s getting to spend time with people that treat you as Bob, the human, and not Bob the golfer.

There’s very little chat about golf. I meet with friends and they just treat me as the pal that they have grown up with.’

The following month, his mother flew out to cook and clean for him in Kentucky as he competed in the US PGA Championship.

Days after she returned home, it was his father stepping on a plane. And there, as he shot a 64 in his opening round, MacIntyre noted a very different dynamic in his dealings with this caddie – a man who knew his game and temperament better than anyone.

He explained: ‘It’s just different, it hits differently, because he properly means it.

‘I know the caddies mean it for another reason, they’re obviously wanting us to do well. But my dad wants me to do well because we’re blood, you know what I mean?

‘There’s nothing other than pride and guts and what we’re trying to do.’

More than anyone, his father understands his son’s struggle to reach the top from an unlikely setting such as Oban.

MacIntyre recalled this week he often could not play in junior tournaments because his parents could not afford it.

He said: ‘Never was I spoon fed. I was always fighting for every bit of it.’

But what his father could afford was his time, which he gave to him daily on his home course.

Now on a huge golfing stage, with challengers such as Rory McIlroy closing in on MacIntyre’s lead, Dad was giving his time again. It was exactly the tonic the homesick golfer needed.

‘He just kept telling me, “we just stay in the fight” and he actually said to me – with four or five holes to go, he goes. “if we play this in one-under par, they got to come get ya”. He knows what to say and when to say it.’

In prevailing by a single stroke, he not only scored the biggest win of his life but secured entry into this month’s US Open and next year’s Masters.

Then there’s the £1.33million prize money – the biggest financial win by a Scottish golfer at any tournament.

The pair embraced on the green and, as emotion overwhelmed him, the caddie fought to remove the flag from the pin to roll up and take home to Oban as a keepsake.

‘Wow,’ he told an interviewer before dissolving into tears.

Doubtless his son will be back with him taking on the 12th at Glencruitten before long.

It is fair to say the hole does not present quite the challenge for him it once did.

Taking part in a short film about his golfing roots a couple of years ago, MacIntyre led the camera crew out of the garden and on to the tee.

He thundered a drive into the middle of the fairway and knocked his second up the hill and onto the blind green, 20ft from the pin.

He casually holed that putt for a birdie three.

He would be the first to admit it was his dad’s birdie too.