THE ANIMATING FORCE of the Masters is a search for the elusive and in that spirit, The42 has managed to find an empty hour in Paul McGinley’s schedule.
McGinley is one of the hardest-working men in what the disciples of Augusta National wouldn’t stoop to call show business. His waking hours cleave between those spent on air and those spent preparing for air: he proves the latter point by arriving into Augusta National’s oak-panelled press building with a folder full of notes and files.
He will be heard on both sides of the Atlantic this week. Along with doing his regular commentary work for Sky Sports, McGinley is now part of the trio drawing five million sets of eyes to NBC’s flagship post-round show, Live From The Masters.
Rich Lerner hosts along with long-time analyst Brandel Chamblee, and McGinley impressed last year to earn the gig on a more permanent basis. The show goes live for three hours shortly after the last putt of the day drops at Augusta National.
The Chamblee/McGinley duo works: McGinley matches Chamblee for depth of research and is unafraid of defending a different point of view.
The press building is one of the few places at Augusta National in which you are allowed to use a phone, so McGinley opens his and scrolls through his notes. They are arranged under several different headings, including ‘Commentary’, ‘Masters’, ‘Rory’, and ‘Saudi.’
He began collating these notes when he started media work in 2015, and they are a collage of statistics, information, and stimulating opinions he has read, along with his own thoughts.
Included in the commentary file are words and phrases he has liked and stored. McGinley is a living, breathing example of the TS Eliot maxim to which this writer has always aspired: Good writers borrow, but great writers steal.
“Take something like, ‘He’s tenacious”, McGinley says while scrolling through one of his commentary files, pointing to the phrase.
“Say I am watching Justin Thomas, and say he’s had 24 putts in bad weather conditions, I will go through the list looking for some inspiration and find ‘tenacious.’ I am not a trained journalist like you are, I don’t have the vocabulary that you have. I have to learn the vocabulary, I have to learn the phrases. I have the insight: I understand the game, I can read between the lines, but it is one thing having it and it’s another to communicate it in a language people understand, and without sounding too uppity, like I know everything.
“I had a good career – top 20 in the world – but I am not Rory McIlroy. I have to be careful I am not preachy. When I hear myself back, sometimes I hear it.’‘F**k, that sounds preachy.’
“And I hate it when I do that, as I am not that kind of person. But you have to give an opinion. I am paid to give an opinion, I am not paid to sit on the fence and say everyone is great and everything is rosy.”
Nothing in golf has been particularly rosy in the last year. As McGinley admits with a smile, the ‘Saudi’ file on his phone is getting bigger and bigger. The Saudi-backed LIV Tour has splintered the sport like nothing else before, and everyone has found themselves forced to pick a side.
McGinley’s issue is less that a swathe of players left for LIV but that some of its players want to continue playing on the European Tour – now rebranded as the DP World Tour - of which McGinley was a board member until earlier this year. An arbitration panel heard arguments from both sides on the matter in February, with a result expected soon.
“They feel they have been victimised, and they want to play the victim”, says McGinley of some of the LIV contingent seeking a return to the Tour. ‘Poor me. Even though I’ve got millions to go over here, poor me, you are not letting me go and play.’
“My view is a simple business one. This is our organisation, you’re leaving our organisation, you are building up a rival that has already taken three tournaments from our [DP World Tour] schedule, along with commercial opportunities and Valderrama golf course, and you want to hurt this organisation from which you made a lot of money and success? Okay, I am part of that organisation and I am going to treat you as a competitor. I don’t want you to be able to come back onto my platform wearing your LIV hat and your LIV clothes, promoting a competitor.
“Why should I let you back? There’s two buses here, which bus are you on? And if you are over there, fine, go. I get it. At that stage in your career, if I was offered 50 million dollars, I’d probably have taken it too. But I wouldn’t have thrown stones back at the Tour and expected to be welcomed back with open arms regardless of what I achieved in the Ryder Cup. Martin Kaymer, Louis Oosthuizen, and Charl Schwartzel haven’t fired stones back. That is the problem a lot of us have: why try and bring us down? Let us do our thing, and stay away.”
McGinley’s stance has led to the souring of long-standing relationships. Ian Poulter and Lee Westwood were two of his captain’s picks for the victorious 2014 Ryder Cup, but McGinley says both confronted him at the JP McManus Pro-Am in Adare Manor last summer.
“Poulter and Westwood; Paul Casey; Bernd Wiesberger”, he answers when I ask if he has got blowback from LIV Tour golfers. “I got attacked down at JP’s Pro-Am last year. I held my ground. Fine, we have different views.”
What did they say?
“‘You’re on the board of the European Tour and you’re on TV and you’re only giving one side of the story.’ I said, ‘fine, I’ll resign from the board. I still have the same views. Go at me now.”
The atmosphere among the golfers from rival tours is – for now at least – not quite as fraught as it was at Adare Manor last year, and McGinley says his relationship with Poulter and Westwood has improved with everyone agreeing to keep to themselves. The strength of this detente may be tested at Augusta, however, with 18 LIV players among the field.
“I don’t think they should be excluded from majors”, says McGinley of the LIV contingent, “as it must be the best players in the world.”
McGinley has faced another grisly undercurrent to golf’s civil split on social media. He says he finds the fact people react to his or Chamblee’s analysis by tweeting bile about them to their employers “disgusting”, and he has learned that not everything that is tweeted his way comes from actual, real people. When on the board of the DP World Tour, he was given advice from social media experts that some of the abuse that comes his way related to his opinions on LIV comes from bot farms, eager to whip up a storm of criticism onto which others can latch.
“I listen to political commentators or football commentators or read something in a newspaper and I will say to myself, ‘I don’t agree with that’”, says McGinley. “What I don’t get is the ferocity to pick up the phone and go on Twitter and make it so personal. ‘I hate this guy, @SkySports, fire him’
“Wait a minute. I think I have a little bit more credibility than that. A lot of the time I am proved wrong, but it’s disgusting. It is really disgusting that people who I have never met would tweet something to get you fired. Brandel…the stuff that comes his way on social media, it is disgusting. Yet everyone who meets him, ‘Oh Brandel, I love your stuff! You’re great!’
“It used to bother me but I am past it now. I post very little on Twitter now, as no matter what I post now it’s…bomb. And because I am seen to have aligned with the Tours, the bots out there, the pro-LIV and pro-Saudi guys, the bots just slam me and get personal. I do not want to play that game.”
Let’s go back to McGinley’s prodigious note-taking. His ‘Rory’ file goes back to 2015, which also happens to be the first year that McIlroy came to the Augusta looking to complete the career Grand Slam. Eight years on, the story remains the same…but perhaps not for much longer.
“He is mentally in a different place”, McGinley says of McIlroy. “He has been working with Bob Rotella for two years now. He doesn’t seem as burdened as he was in the past. His putting is better, I like the naturalness with which he is putting. There is a flow to it, he isn’t stuck over it, trying to be a scientist. Rory is creative, he is an artist. He paints pictures, he hits shots, and he reacts to what he sees.”
In one sense, how could McIlroy not be burdened by what he has on the line every time he comes to Augusta? Only five players in the history of the sport have ever completed the career Grand Slam, and McIlroy is out to claim it under the uniquely suffocating pressure that comes when a crowd mingles adulation with desperate longing and then returns to the same place every year to do it all over again.
“In Ireland, we have no real understanding of the superstardom of Rory McIlroy”, says McGinley. “We really under-appreciate him. I love Ireland to bits and I love Irish people to bits, but sometimes we don’t put up our heroes up on the pedestal they deserve. I am a huge U2 fan and when I hear some criticism of U2 and I think, ‘Really? Have you been to America? Have you seen how big they are? And have you seen how Irish they are, and they promote things?’
“He is genuine. The Rory McIlroy you have dinner with is the same Rory McIlroy you see in front of the media at press conferences. He doesn’t put on a show in front of the media like some players do. He has forthright opinions, he is a very good listener. He listens to opinions, he might not agree with them. People like that.
“In soccer terms, we have Lionel Messi. Imagine the Irish soccer team has someone of Messi’s standard, imagine how we would laud him? That’s what we have in golf. It just baffles me: some people want to slag him off? Just because he doesn’t always win?
“Golf is a very difficult game and it’s easy to throw stones at golfers because it is so difficult to have success. If you win two or three times a season, that is a phenomenal season.”
McGinley tells a story to illustrate that fact. In 1992, when he was just starting out as a pro, he managed to wrangle himself into a dinner with Jack Nicklaus as he played golf in college with his son. At the end of the dinner, Nicklaus shook his hand outside of the restaurant and gave him one parting piece of advice.
“‘Paul, good luck in your career. Just remember one thing: I spent 90% of my time losing in my career and I am the most successful player ever to play the game. Managing your losses is what this game is about.’”
If McIlroy is going to end this curiously painful wait and take his place among the gods of the game, he will need to learn from those previous Augusta losses and make a fast start.
McGinley again turns to his assiduous research, saying that, “the secrets are in the past. There are keys to unlocking a course.”
He runs through McIlroy’s recent opening-round scores around Augusta: he has averaged a first-round position in the 50s since 2019 without shooting anything better than a 73 on a Thursday.
He then plucks two stats from his notes.
23 of the last 25 winners have been in the top 10 after round one.
Six of the last nine winners have led after the second round.
“This is not a golf course to chase on”, says McGinley, “as that is when you crash and burn. When you shoot 75, you have to take chances. And it’s hard to claim back on this golf course as there is danger lurking everywhere.
“Coming out of the blocks is key here. If you’re behind, it’s like Lewis Hamilton going around on a wet track and having to out the foot down. This is like a wet track.
“It goes back to expectation. Those first rounds are not because he loses his game or he prepares badly. It is because he is nervous and because of the weight of expectation on his shoulders. The best way of getting rid of expectation is by shooting a high score. I know: I made a career of doing it.”
McGinley is pretty bashful when we do talk about his career.
“The game never came easy to me. I never had what I would call talent. I had grit and determination and I made myself a pretty good player, but it was always a battle.”
These are qualities he has evidently taken to television.
