Maverick McNealy and wife Maya in November after his win at the RSM Classic.
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Winning is hard.
Winning is hard. Winning is hard. Winning is hard. Winning is hard. Winning is hard.
Winning is hard.
Maya McNealy heard it and Maverick McNealy said it — often. (If you’re curious, the number of sentences that start this article represent the number of years the latter didn’t finish an event on top as a pro.) And, to his defense, winning is arduous. They’re can be only one winner, right? It’s the beauty of sports. And it’s wart. Only one? Why not a dozen? You wouldn’t fault McNealy for at least wondering something like that. For years, he’d been at the top of nearly everyone’s list of best players to never win, a compilation you don’t mind spending some time on, just not, you know, for years.
Then, he wasn’t. In November, at the RSM Classic, the last PGA Tour tournament of 2024, he won. Epically too. McNealy had been tied with three other pros on the 18th hole of the final round, before dropping a 7-iron from 185 yards out to 5 feet, 5 inches that led to a birdie and a maiden victory.
Finally. Thanks to some advice from Maya.
Tuesday, the pro was reminiscing about it all. This week, they’re playing the Sentry, the lid-lifter for the Tour season, and it’s naturally a time to look ahead. And look back. It’s part celebration. And part duplication. You want to understand what worked and run it back again and again.
For McNealy, it was a 15-word heart-to-heart.
“I definitely appreciated the win because I realized how hard it is to win,” McNealy said. “I actually got to the point where my wife is, like, ‘Stop talking about how hard it is — just go out and do what you’re doing.’ That was the big lesson, was that I didn’t do anything differently than what I’ve been doing — it just all kind of fell into place.
“I had lots of chances. I don’t know, I wasn’t really worried about not having won. I wasn’t really thinking any less. I figured it would probably happen — just needed some stuff to go right. And also kind of figure that the first one’s probably the hardest, probably like your first major whatever, each milestone.”
A thought from his younger brother, Scout, helped too. He’s his caddie, and the pro said he thinks a bit linearly. “My kind of engineering brain,” he called it. To that end, he believed his career would look like this: Get card, keep card, start making cuts, start finishing in the top 10, start playing in the final group, start finishing near the top, start winning. But who’s to say you can’t just win now, Scout said. Skip whatever steps in between. Then he did.
“I’ve always thought that I had a chance to be a really, really good player,” McNealy said, “because at every point, or at any point throughout my career, I feel like I’ve been elite in one part of the game, just not all at the same time. I’ve driven it great, 2021 to 2022; approach play was really good in college; short game has been really good lately; and in 2023, I was No. 1 in putting.
“So I feel like all the pieces have been there, just not together at once. So I think I’ve done a better job of figuring out. Working with [coach] Scotty Hamilton, especially on the golf swing, was the biggest piece that’s been missing. Figuring out what it was that I needed to get back to elite ball striking, and that’s what was holding me back for the last little bit.”
Was McNealy nervous at the RSM? For sure, he said. But he also said Tuesday that he’d watched a replay of the final round of last year’s 3M Open — where he contended before tying for third — and saw something. He said he looked calm, while others didn’t — so “they must have been really feeling it. So I just kind of took that to heart where everybody’s nervous, everybody’s uncomfortable.”
The shot on 18 at the RSM then went down to what Maya had told him.
“Standing over the 6-iron on 18, I just executed exactly as I’ve been doing because it’s been working and it’s been really good,” McNealy said. “Standing over the putt, I was like, I’m really nervous right now, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to hit a bad putt, that has no bearing on me executing the shot any worse than I would. So just kind of went through my routine and it came off perfect.”
One last thing:
How many times has he gone back and watched that putt?
“Probably 10 or 12,” McNealy said. “It’s been pretty fun. Sometimes if I’m just bored on the range I’m like, ‘Oh, that was pretty cool, that’s fun.’”
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Nick Piastowski
Golf.com Editor
Nick Piastowski is a Senior Editor at Golf.com and Golf Magazine. In his role, he is responsible for editing, writing and developing stories across the golf space. And when he’s not writing about ways to hit the golf ball farther and straighter, the Milwaukee native is probably playing the game, hitting the ball left, right and short, and drinking a cold beer to wash away his score. You can reach out to him about any of these topics — his stories, his game or his beers — at nick.piastowski@golf.com.
