HAMILTON, Ontario – Robert MacIntyre doesn’t like drones.
“If it didn’t go away, I was going to start throwing my clubs at it,” he said. “That’s how annoyed I was getting.”
During Sunday’s final round of the RBC Canadian Open, the CBS Sports drone following his pairing bothered him to end.
It had started on Saturday on the 18th hole but it began in earnest on the drivable par-4 fifth hole when the crowd went silent.
“It’s a big wasp. I asked ’em to get rid of it. They did,” he explained. “Next hole, I’m in the bunker, and sure enough everyone’s silent and all I hear is this buzzing again. I look up and here it is. And, I don’t know, one of the guys must have been getting sick of me. I just kept turning to him because I knew he was the man to go to when that drone starts annoying me because yesterday on 18 it was the same guy. And he just radioed, ‘Get that drone out of here.’”
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MacIntyre could be heard saying, “I told you once, I’m not going to tell you again.”
On the CBS broadcast, Jim Nantz, Dottie Pepper, who was following the group, and Trevor Immelman understood that it was disturbing MacIntyre but pushed back that drones are now part of the coverage. A request for a comment from CBS Sports wasn’t answered.
“They were horrible,” MacIntyre’s father, Dougie, who served as his caddie this week, said. “He was getting a wee bit agitated. It takes your concentration. In the back of the head you’re thinking about the buzzing so he called the rules official over.”
That occurred at the ninth fairway when MacIntyre was preparing to hit a wedge to the green.
“All I can hear is this drone again, and I had had enough at that point. Rules official from the R&A was just beside us, and I brought her over, and I said, ‘Look, this drone needs to get out of here. I’ve said it three times now. The drone is annoying me, the drone’s putting me off, it’s too close.’ I mean, it’s easier when the blimps up there, but it’s obviously the weather and stuff and it’s just, I had a job to do, and anything that was getting in my way was getting told to get out of the way. I was focused today and that drone was doing my head, and so I told it to get away.”
MacIntyre’s father said he helped calm down his son, who focused on the task at hand and earned his first Tour title.
“He gets grumpy. That’s his downfall. When he gets grumpy and mad at himself the game goes. He knows it himself,” Dougie said.
But the big wasp in the sky failed to sting MacIntyre on Sunday.
