Fast forward a few months and Mackie was teeing it up alongside Max Faulkner, one of the greats of the game, at The Open at Muirfield. Having got through qualifying earlier on in the week, Jock was, by his own admission, “jolly nervous.”
"The biggest difference between amateurs and professionals back then became immediately obvious,” he remembered. “On the first hole Faulkner hit his approach just short of the green and received generous applause from the crowd, which was understandable, as he was a former Open champion. Then I stepped up, having hit my tee shot slightly further, and put it on the green, closer than him, only a few yards from the flag. The crowd remained deathly silent. It was all pretty amusing.”
Later on in his round, at the 15th hole, Jock sprayed his drive into a beverage stand. “In those days you couldn’t get relief - you had to play it where it lay, although it was a little embarrassing taking my stance in a hut,” he said. It proved to be one of the more memorable holes of his career, however, as Mackie chipped back to the fairway, put his third on to the green and sunk the putt for a par.
Mackie, who said he never considered turning professional, later became the managing director at trading company Robertson, Wilson & Company before becoming chief executive of AS Watson, Hutchison’s largest subsidiary, in 1970. During his time heading up AS Watson, Mackie established the PARKnSHOP supermarket chain and took Watson’s into the retail sector.
Mackie continued playing to an extremely high standard until his 60s when his rugby days caught up with him. Hip trouble forced him to put time on his amateur golf career, but his connections with the game on a local level didn’t end there. In 1980 he acted as non-playing captain for the Hong Kong World Amateur Team Championship and he would later go on to become president of the Hong Kong Golf Association. He was also successful in pushing through Hong Kong’s bid to host both the Eisenhower and Espirito Santo events in Hong Kong in 1984.
Mackie was chieftain of the Hong Kong St Andrew’s Society in 1972/73 and the society’s annual golf tournament is known as Jock’s Pot in his honour.
He is survived by his wife, Jean, and his family of three daughters, 10 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
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