The dust has barely settled on the 43rd Ryder Cup and we’re already working ourselves into a fankle about the 44th Ryder Cup. Europe’s hefty defeat last weekend prompted such an intense post-mortem, the pathologist’s report would’ve been longer than Sir Keir Starmer’s keynote speech.
The USA certainly delivered a great statement of intent with that thumping 19-9 win in Wisconsin and the gauntlet was hurled down with so much force, there’s still dents in the Whistling Straits turf.
For Robert MacIntyre, the challenge of making the next European Ryder Cup team for the match in Rome in 2023 is one he is eager to embrace again. He was knocking on the door this year and the Oban left-hander wants to make a bigger racket over the next couple of years. In fact, he wants to see a sturdy Scottish assault in the general jockeying and jousting for European team places.
“I personally think that there will be at least one of us, if not two, maybe three,” said MacIntyre, ahead of his return to European Tour action in this week’s Alfred Dunhill Links Championship at St Andrews, Carnoustie and Kingsbarns. “The results speak for themselves. Calum Hill is on a trend that's rocketing and Grant Forrest is obviously in great form. And then there's me. I'm fully expecting to be there in two years’ time.
“But it's golf. I don't know what's going to happen from here to the end of the season. I don't know what's going to happen from here to Rome. But that is high on my list. This year I was close, but I was trying to achieve other things too.
“As much as I was trying to get on the Ryder Cup team, I was trying to get my PGA Tour card and, in an individual sport, do what's best for my career.
“Come the start of next season, there are going to be goals set, and I'm 100 per cent sure that Rome is going to be top of the list for a two-year goal.”
Following thrilling showings in the Masters and The Open, as well as a victory over Dustin Johnson in the WGC Matchplay, MacIntyre thrust himself into the Ryder Cup reckoning. It wasn’t to be for the 25-year-old. “I got a call from Padraig (Harrington) just before he went on to announce his team,” added MacIntyre of the European captain’s courtesy tinkle to tell him he wasn’t getting one of his wild cards. “It was out of respect and I knew it was coming. He is always going to be encouraging me so we go again.”
Having missed the cut in the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth, MacIntyre flung the clubs in a corner – “they stayed in the travel case for a week” - and had a three week break after a hectic period of transatlantic travel.
Last weekend, as the Ryder Cup was roaring on, MacIntyre was on the shinty field for Oban Celtic and scored in an 8-0 rout of Aberdour. “I got a couple of bruises but I get them just running about at my mum’s house,” he added with a smile of the general crash, bang, wallop of a very different stick and ba’ game.
It’s back to business on the golf course this week in an event MacIntyre first played in back in 2013 as a teenage amateur. A lot has happened in his career since then and the European Tour winner still looks back on that outing with great fondness.
“That was pretty much the time when I realised I could play at this level,” he said of that brief taste of tour life. “I must have been 16 and that really opened my eyes to the world of golf. I thought, ‘I could do this for a living’. And here we are now.”
MacIntyre has missed his last three cuts, with two early exits on the Korn Ferry Tour as he tried to earn that PGA Tour card being followed by a halfway departure from Wentworth. It’s the most cuts he’s missed in row since he was on the Challenge Tour in 2018. In this game, of course, every week brings fresh opportunity.
“If I go out here and put on a good performance, then no one is talking about those three missed cuts,” he said. “I’m not thinking about them at all. I'm out here this week to try and win a golf tournament.”
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