Question & answer with Peter McEvoy

Gi:What have been your personal highlights of the 2009 season?
PM: I took over junior amateur golf for the R&A in 2008, so this is my second year in that role and it’s taken me that time to get fully up to speed and understand how it works, who the leading players are and who is coming through. The GB&A side were victorious at Ganton in the annual Jacques Leglise Trophy for Under 18s – and without question that was the highlight of my year. Where once we dominated in this category it’s now a highly competitive match – in fact I’d say that at this year’s fixture we were probably the underdogs, such is the strength of the European game at junior level. But we had a good team and we beat them well.

Gi:What exactly is your role with the R&A in the development of junior golf?
PM: My focus is very much on identifying the nine players to comprise the team for this one match – GB&I v The Continent of Europe. It really is the centrepiece of European Boys’ golf for the year, and so I go to all of the main junior tournaments and mix with national selectors in a process that culminates with us identifying the leading players and selecting the team – which I do alongside four other selectors. It’s a process that familiarises me with all of the leading talent in junior golf in the British Isles. The amateur game is challenged at the moment – the only true amateur game is junior golf.

Gi: Does your role extend to overseeing the coaching of the players at national level?
PM: No, not at all. The coaching is taken care of by each of the national unions – and the top players certainly don’t need any more coaching. I think the game has gone a little bit coaching mad, to tell you the truth. Or should I say went coaching mad. Common sense is coming back into it. As far as I can tell, the players coming through now are being treated more as individuals rather than being put on a conveyor belt through a system.

GI: Italy’s Matteo Manassero gave us all a glimpse of the standard at the highest level of amateur golf at this year’s Open – who on the home front caught your eye this year?
PM: Well, we have a few. Manassero I noticed a couple of years ago. He played in the Jacques Leglise Trophy at 14, and even then he was quite outstanding. He was a small boy, he didn’t hit the ball so far, but you could tell he had absolutely everything. In fact, he reminded me of Sergio Garcia, who I remember seeing play in a Spanish men’s international team when he was also 14, and he was just incredible. But we have a number of really good players of our own. Probably the best under 18 at the moment is Tom Lewis, who won the Boys’ Championship this year. He’s a terrific ball striker. You could put him on the range at a European Tour event and he wouldn’t look out of place. Another is Sebastian Crookall-Nixon, who is 16. I mark him as one to watch in the future. There are probably 20 really good players in that age bracket. Chris Lloyd, from Bristol has put in some fantastic performances this year, he’s another who would be up there in the top three or four, a real chance of making it.

Gi: You say junior golf is the only real form of amateur golf – what are your chief concerns when you look at the health of the amateur game at the highest level?
PM: My biggest concern is the number of young players who turn pro, because there’s a finite requirement for professional golfers on the various tours available – whether that be on the main European Tour, the Challenge Tour or the EuroPro Tour.

Gi: A couple of new fledgling tours (the 66 Tour, the Lynx Tour) have been announced for next year – are there simply too many of these smaller tours?
PM: Those smaller development tours exist for the simple reason there is a market for them. But my fear is that the majority of the young golfers who play in these events have no chance of making any money. They get to their mid-20s only to discover they are just not good enough at golf, they have no education and they get lost to the game. It’s a vicious circle: they become disenchanted with it all, so their golf suffers, and they suffer as individuals as well.

Gi: I guess the problem is for many of these players they’ll never know how far they can go until they’ve given it a shot?
PM: I see a couple of problems. One is the exaggerated attention that’s given to the pro game – that’s the world we live in nowadays, all part of the celebrity-conscious society, everyone wants to be a part of it. But the main problem is that it’s just so easy to have a false frame of reference. Say you get a good young amateur who goes out and shoots 68 in a tournament. Then he reads the papers and sees that Tiger Woods also shot 68 somewhere in the world, and he makes a comparison. That’s the trouble. Unless you actually play the courses these top guys play you have no idea of the gulf that exists. In other sports – tennis is a good example – when you have to play directly against an opponent, you quickly find out where you stand. You don’t in golf. This is an area I feel quite strongly about. Up at Ganton with the Jacques Leglise team this year – and bear in mind we’re talking about the elite players here, with average handicaps of +3 or +4 – we were having dinner one night and I just put it to the table casually, ‘Who’s the best player you have ever played with?’. One of the Irish lads had played with Darren Clarke, but none of the others had ever played with a top pro golfer. So they had no idea about the standard required to make it at that level. In 18 months time a lot of those lads will be thinking about turning pro – and they really don’t know what the difference is.

Gi: So what would be your solution?
PM: One of the things I would like to do with young players, rather than throwing more money at sports psychologists, trainers, dieticians and so on is actually spend a bit of money on giving these players the opportunity to mix it up over a couple of days with some of the best players in the game. That would be a real eye-opener.

Gi: There’s a huge churn rate every year?
PM: Sadly, yes. Jeff Toye, my predecessor as Chairman of Selectors at the R&A, always said there’s a town in the south of England that is full of wannabe pros – and I’m beginning to think he may be right! The stats tell us there’s room on the European tour for two or three new English pros each year – to make average wage or better. The trouble is, when you say that to a room of 60 kids, they all believe they are the one.

Gi: But you have to have that self-belief?
PM: Of course you do, absolutely. But we need to identify a way of bridging the gap between a dream and reality before they make that jump. I see two problems – (1) giving them that experience and (2) the actual process of making the jump from amateur to pro. You know, golf is unique – it’s the only sport where you can say to the world ‘I’m turning pro’. If you want to be a pro footballer you have to wait until a club recognises your talent and signs you up. It’s the same in rugby and in most other sports. This is a big weakness in golf.

Gi: So you think there should be more stringent qualifying procedures in golf?
PM: Rather than define amateur status I think we should define a pro. We need a strict code of practice, a qualification process, call it what you will, that identifies those players actually good enough to be known as a tournament professional golfer. And I wouldn’t worry about the money in top amateur golf. I don’t think amateur status is about money – the market will sort that out. If you draw a line, say, three notches down from the European Tour, for example, there’s nobody going to put a pile of money into that level of the game, and in any case you can’t expect young players these days to be a full time player and not get some money back to cover what are considerable expenses. So I’d open up a lot of these fledgling pro tours to top amateur players, allowing them to compete and earn some cash towards their outgoings as they discover whether or not they have the game to make it. But at the same time, they would also be available to play international team golf. That would help the amateur game. To my mind, the way the rules are currently set up to define Amateur Status is a back to front way of looking at what is a real problem. Rather than worry about defining an amateur, let’s be realistic and define a pro. This is only for scratch events, no handicap involved, don’t worry too much about the small amounts of money on offer. The decision to turn pro should not be an option – you have to earn the right to be a pro.

Gi: That’s an interesting concept.
PM: I just think the current situation is unsustainable. As I say, the biggest problem we have in the amateur game is the number of young players who decide they are good enough to turn pro. A lot of them come to me and ask my opinion, and I tell them straight what I think. And more often than not I tell them they have no chance at all. Then they go off and do it anyway, never to be heard of again. I don’t know why they ask in the first place. It’s almost because there is no other way. Really, what they want to do is play international competitive golf – but you cannot get into the international teams these days unless you play full time and that’s expensive. So they turn pro by default

Gi:We are here at Celtic Manor for the final of the Single Figure Golfer series – how did you come to be involved?
PM: Paul Hemming and Robert Millar, the founders of Single Figure Golfer concept, invited me to captain the Amateur side for the inaugural event at Woodall Spa last year. We had a good go at it last year, developing the format with the Grand Final being a quasi Ryder Cup match against some pretty well-known pros including Paul Way, Philip Walton, Steve Richardson, Gordon Brand Jnr and Roger Chapman. And it worked very well. The feedback from the players was fantastic – both the amateurs who qualify to make the SFG Team and also the pros who we have on board.

Gi: Just talking to the players here at Celtic Manor there’s a real buzz about the match?
PM: Yeah, it’s incredible. I held a team meeting last night in the hotel and it’s amazing how in the space of 24 hours you can bond a group of people who hardly know each other and you come out with a common purpose. They all enjoyed playing the 2010 course, which is spectacular, though in truth it’s probably a bit too much of a handful for a lot of them. Next year the Grand Final of the Single Figure Golfer series is due to be staged at Trevose in Cornwall, a superb Harry Colt links which staged the Brabazon Trophy a couple of years ago. They will love it.

Gi: You’re not short on experience when it comes to high-power team meetings – what sort of things form the basis of a typical team-talk ahead of a Walker Cup match?
PM: I like to come at it almost third party-ish in an attempt to change people’s expectation levels. When I took over the Walker Cup in 1999, we’d lost 32 of the last 35 matches, so it’s fair to say the expectation was that we were going to lose! But if you look at the team, what really changed was that you had members of the team who were in college in America – your Luke Donalds and your Paul Caseys, and they knew that they were better than the top Americans. And the Americans knew that, too. That made the difference – we knew that they knew that we knew, if you know what I mean. Suddenly we realised we had a winning team. I went to see Saatchi & Saatchi actually – Adam Crozier, who was there at the time – and explained the situation. They came up with a short video, three minutes or so, which just explained that we had the best players in the world and there was reason we couldn’t win. It worked.

Gi:What’s the best motivational message or lesson you have ever learned?
PM: One of the best lessons I ever had was, if you take any league table in the world, for any sport, football or whatever, you’ll see two thirds of points are won at home, one third won away. Which means you have twice the chance of winning on your home pitch as you do anywhere else – which is utterly ridiculous when you think about it. Purely because when you play at home you have higher expectations than you do when you play away. Crazy. You can control the expectations, and so that’s what we did.

Gi:What was your take on the outcome of the Walker Cup match this year?
PM: At the end of the day, talent is highly cyclical. You go through good periods and then less good periods – and we’re not going through a particularly strong period at the moment. Behind that, though, there’s a trend for the average age of the GB&I Walker Cup side going down, which I don’t think you will see happen with the American side. They all go to college, they are 22 most of them, and they usually throw in a couple of reinstated pros. In my day the average age was 25; now we are down near 20 or so. Soon it will be 19. I don’t like to be pessimistic, but it’s hard enough when you are playing a country five times your size, when you add the fact you are less experienced as well, it’s harder and harder.

Gi: Is the fact fewer players are opting to go down the US college system an issue?
PM: It’s because of the lottery funding and the Elite Squads we have. If you are 17 or 18 now and you have the choice of going to college in the States or play in the Elite Squads, with all expenses paid, all the coaching you need and the opportunity to compete around the world, in South Africa, Australia and so on – and you don’t have to attend lectures – which would you choose? What happens now is young players do this for a couple of years – as opposed to a four-year degree course – and then they turn pro. So we’re back to that problem again.

Gi: The thing they are missing out on is life away from home, a rite of passage to adulthood?
PM: Right. I always remember Luke Donald. Young, skinny 18 years old, suitcase in hand, off to Chicago on his own, then four years later he’s world’s No. 1 amateur. That’s a life-changing experience. He’d done that from nothing. A tough breeding ground. Alternatively, you can stay at home and be pampered....not as good on the life experience front.

Gi: Talk to me about PowerPlayGolf – we’ve opened this feature with a photograph of you alongside a Bollywood actress – you’re on to good thing!
PM: I think this is one of the most important things that is happening in golf. Because all sports change, the world changes, our ability to concentrate for any length of time is challenged, we require instant gratification. We’ve seen it in the success of other sports – 7-a-side rugby in the Olympics, Twenty20 has completely revolutionised cricket, and yet golf has not adapted. Effectively, we’re still playing test matches – we don’t even have a one-day game. Seventy-two hole strokeplay will always be the ultimate test and that should not change. But we need something else to attract more people. A bite-size program that gives you added excitement and we have really tested PowerPlayGolf extensively for the last two years. We are in 27 countries now, and we’ve run 10 pro events for club pros to test the TV format, and it all works.

Gi: The ultimate goal being to launch a series of televised events?
PM: Yes. At the moment we are just about to secure funding for three big pilot TV events in 2010, in Asia, America and UK. The format is pretty simple: two flags on every green – think of the Black flag as the last-day pin, White flag the easy pin. The tournament is over 9 holes, and three times in the first 8 holes you have to go for a Black flag – and you have to nominate before you hit your tee-shot. When playing to the White flag, normal stableford scores apply. To the Black flag it is a modified stableford system, none for a blob, 1 for a bogey, 2 for par, 6 for a birdie, 8 for an eagle. Basically, over the first 8 holes, on three occasions you say, ‘Right, I’m going for it’. If you don’t do well on your Black flag options you don’t win. On the 9th hole we give a fourth PowerPlay option, but if you drop a shot or worse your score is -2, so things can change very quickly. In the pro TP version we have a 16-man field, and it’s a shotgun start on tees 1- 8, so the action is instantaneous for the fans. We make the 9th hole a short par four – made for TV. The leading 6 players go back to the 9th tee in a shoot-out, so it’s guaranteed entertainment to the final putt. The pros that have played tell us that in 72-hole events patience is often the key – you wait for something to happen. In PowerPlayGolf you have to make things happen.

Gi: And the Bollywood connection?
PM: Most recently I’ve been out to India, and the biggest golf tournament ever played in India is now a PowerPlayGolf format, sponsored by Signature whiskey, one of the biggest in the world. It’s all tied in with Bollywood stars, real razzmatazz and they love it. They already have the IPL and one-day cricket, it’s what they want. With the Olympics coming on, lots of other countries will now be funding golf, and it’s not necessarily the case that what’s gone before – the staple diet of golf we have grown used to – is what’s best for the future of the game.

Gi:What’s your view of the Olympics? Were you behind golf being included?
PM: I was and I am, because governments are going to support golf. It’s not going to make much difference to Britain, or mature golf markets, though I suppose it may give it a shot in the arm, but if you are an emerging country you are going to get some serious funding and that’s terrific for golf generally.

Gi: Do you think the Olympics should embrace an amateur element?
PM: No, I don’t. We live in a commercial world and the Olympics is a commercial entity, so it’s only natural they would want the biggest names in the game to be involved to boost TV ratings. The good thing is that golf’s in, and that will be good for manufacturers and anyone with interest in the golf industry. It’s been hard to get this recognition, which is to the credit of the governing bodies involved in the bid.

Gi: The Ryder Cup is less than a year away – how do you rate the 2010 course?
PM: It’s interesting. You know, there used to be the thinking that we should take the Americans to a links course, to out-fox them. But because of the way the game has evolved in Europe, our players are bigger and more powerful, and so now an American-style course is to our advantage. This is a big, tough, golf course. It’s nearly 7,500 yards – and we’re talking about a river valley in Wales, so it’s not fast-running very often. It’s highly demanding, an unrelenting course. And because I suspect our players will hit it further than they do, I think we’ll do OK.