‘Wear my heart on my sleeve:’ Robert MacIntyre discusses his Masters meltdown
Robert MacIntyre had a week to forget at the 2026 Masters.
The 29-year-old Scots player has arrived in good form, following a T2 at the Valero Texas Open and a fourth-place finish at the Players Championship. But MacIntyre’s week at Augusta National came to an abrupt end during the opening round, where he made a quadruple-bogey nine on the par-5 15th en route to a first-round 80. Cameras caught MacIntyre walking off the 15th green after putting two balls in the water, and he was reportedly reprimanded by Augusta National. MacIntyre skipped the press after his first and second rounds and posted an AI-generated photo of himself as a Masters gnome doing the same thing after missing the cut.
On Thursday, after the first round of the RBC Heritage, MacIntyre spoke to Sky Sports’ Nick Dougherty about his tumultuous days at Augusta National.
“I know what I did was not the best way to do things,” MacIntyre said. “But look, I wear my heart on my sleeve. I try my best to control my emotions. I work with someone else at home. And yes, there was a lot that happened, and I was disappointed about that, but I’m very good at putting things behind me. Things that are said elsewhere, they don’t bother me. I’ve got my family, friends, part of my team, and these guys that I tell them that’s really wrong. Me.
“And that’s how I go about life. I do what I want, the way we want, not just personally but with family and friends. And we run our business the way we want to run it. Some people like it, some people don’t. But, at the end of the day, it’s a job and I try to get out here and do the best I can.”
MacIntyre has always been an emotional player. After a poor title defense at last year’s Genesis Scottish Open, MacIntyre explained how he shakes off bad weeks “mentally” for a while. That allows him to quickly reorganize and move on.
“I can go as mentally as I want for an hour and then, after that, I’m back to life,” MacIntyre said at Royal Portrush ahead of the 2025 Open Championship. “I can do whatever I want for an hour. Anything I want. You can break things down. You can do whatever I want for an hour. After that hour is gone, my work is done. An hour and a half before my cycle, two hours before my cycle, I’m getting ready, so nobody’s stopping me. It’s warm-up, stretching, exercise, all that, eight o’clock-, eight o’clock, eight o’clock, eight o’clock. work.
“If you have a bad day at work, you’re going to get angry. It happens to me a lot,” MacIntyre said, laughing. “It’s been a long time, it used to be difficult for me to start again, but these days, there are so many golf tournaments and you never know what’s coming next week.”
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Now ranked among the top 15 golfers in the world, MacIntyre knows he can’t let his emotions and frustrations get the better of him. A professional golfer’s hamster wheel is always spinning. The tournament ends, you win or lose, and you quickly move on to the next one. It’s important to be able to click the reset button quickly. Let the steam out and you’re ready to go again.
But emotions are also what make Robert MacIntyre who he is. To extinguish all his fire would be to remove part of his flesh’s soul. It’s a tightrope he has to walk — sometimes he makes a clean cut and sometimes he falls.
“I’m on fire on the golf course when I’m in the championship rounds,” MacIntyre said at the Open. “I’m going to go down, I was going to say something unusual, but bad words there. I’m going to hit the bag. I’m going to say strong things, but that’s what keeps me going. If I’m going and I’m happy, I just make a double bogey or people clap, thank you very much, that’s not me. I’m need to smash that rip out something I do. It’s better for me to rip out something, but for me it’s taking it out and not letting it affect the next shot.
A bad week at the Masters was frustrating. After finishing second at last year’s US Open and this year’s Players Championship weekend, MacIntyre is more confident than ever that he has done the right things to win major tournaments. He left Augusta National disappointed with a performance that did not reflect the current state of his game.
But after two days at home, Robert MacIntyre was ready to roll the Masters into oblivion and get back on the horse at Harbor Town.
In the game of golf, there is little time to play shots that you can never get back.
