This time last year, Maverick McNealy was ranked 102nd in the world, a promising player on a Tour full of them. He hadn’t yet won on the PGA Tour, and as he watched Scottie Scheffler win another green jacket, he made himself a vow: Get to Augusta next year.
“The Masters last year was a tough one for me to watch because I wanted so badly to be there,” McNealy told Yahoo Sports this week. “It's always one of my favorite tournaments to watch, and it just it really bugged me that it didn't have a tee time.”
So McNealy did what every good 2020s-era golfer does: huddled with his team at the start of the fall season and made a plan. Their goals: Get into the top 60 to qualify for the Pebble Beach Pro-Am and the Genesis Invitational; get into the top 50 to qualify for the Masters; and get into the Sentry at Kapalua by winning a tournament.
The fall was decent but not spectacular, and McNealy’s carefully laid plans were coming apart. With one tournament left, the possibilities of hitting his marks were dwindling.
“We had one out of the three locked up going to Sea Island,” site of the RSM Classic, the year’s final tournament, McNealy said. “It's really just a Hail Mary pass to try and get the last two locked up. There was really only one position that was going to get it done for us.”
And then McNealy went out and finished in that one position — first — and the whole world opened up for him. He leaped all the way up to 31st in the world, and soon afterward he received that envelope that every golfer dreams of: an invitation to the Masters.
“I'm really excited to just experience one of the cathedrals of golf and see what the Masters is all about,” says McNealy, who’s now ranked 16th in the world. “It's something I've watched on TV, but I know it's going to be even more amazing in person, and I'm excited to see how I play the golf course.”
Ever since the invitation arrived, McNealy has been plotting strategy, watching old YouTube videos and working on his shot arsenal to prepare for the course. “Sometimes it’s not super relevant to watch a major from 12 years ago because the game’s played differently and the course has changed,” he says. “But the bones of [Augusta National] and the way it’s played are really the same.”
Invitees have an opportunity to play the course ahead of time, and McNealy teed it up for the first time last Monday. “I’m excited to broaden my field of view for some of the short game shots around the greens,” he says. “I think there’s a reason why a guy like Jordan Spieth had a lot of success in his first few Masters, because he sees shots like that all the ...
