Alan McGregor - Leader of the Links

Alan McGregor, who retired as chief executive of the St Andrews Links Trust at the turn of the year, talks to HK Golfer's Lewine Mair about his time in charge of the Home of Golf

Alan McGregor does not disagree with the notion that he has enjoyed 13 years in arguably the best job in the game. “I think,” he nods, “that it’s because almost everyone who works in the golf industry has a passion for the game. It makes everything so much easier.”
The Open championships of 2000, 2005 and 2010 took place during McGregor’s term of office and this modest man wastes no time in picking out
something he had got more wrong than right. “After Tiger had won in 2005,” he recalled, “I remember saying that it would be the best possible
scenario if he were to come back in 2010 with the chance of overtaking Jack Nicklaus’s haul of 18 majors. It seemed like a sensible call at the time.”
McGregor’s love of the game was fostered during preparatory schooldays at New Park in St Andrews. The establishment boasted a golf-mad headmaster named Derek McLeod who, whenever the great golfers of the day were in town, wasted no time in calling a holiday. “He might say it was because So-and-So had got 42 per cent or whatever in his Common Entrance exams,” says McGregor, with the 42 per cent figure hopefully having rather more to do with the telling of a good story than the hard facts.

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