Ford Maverick, Dodge Dakota, Dodge Colt and Jeep Scout.
Four American-made machines.
Kind of like PGA Tour golfer Maverick McNealy and his three brothers — Dakota, Colt and Scout. Maverick actually drives a Ford Explorer that used to belong to his mother, Susan, while the family has two more Explorers and two Ford F-150 trucks.
“My three brothers and I are all named after American cars,” Maverick, the eldest, said, “because of the Detroit connection.”
The 24-year-old Stanford graduate is 8 under par at the conclusion of the second round at the Rocket Mortgage Classic and seeking his first Tour victory. Playing at Detroit Golf Club feels like a homecoming, even though McNealy has never lived in Michigan.
“This is my dad’s stomping grounds when he grew up,” Maverick said. “It’s pretty cool.”
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Scott McNealy grew up in Bloomfield Hills and graduated from Cranbrook High in 1972. He went to Harvard and co-founded Sun Microsystems — the company that developed the computer programming language Java — in 1982. In 2010, Oracle Corporation bought it for $7.4 billion.
Scott, 65, returned home four years ago for the 116th U.S. Amateur championship in Bloomfield Hills to caddie for his son.
But the family’s connection to Detroit didn’t start with the current head of the household. Nothing would have been the same had it not been for the late Raymond William McNealy Jr., Maverick’s grandfather, who moved the family to Michigan to work at the American Motors Corporation, where he became vice chairman of the automotive manufacturing company.
“My second brother (Dakota) is now working for Autonomic, which is Ford’s cloud computing capability,” Maverick said. “(He’s) just finishing up his computer science degree at Stanford. A lot of Motor City connections with our family.”
The grandfather has another claim to family fame that resonates with Maverick: eight holes-in-one in his lifetime. He played for 20 years at Turtle Creek Country Club in Florida and once was a member of Orchard Lake Country Club in Birmingham.
Scott learned about golf from Raymond and passed the knowledge down to Maverick, who has become quite the budding star.
“He was the junior champion at Orchard Lake Country Club back in the day, and I think a sailing champion as well,” Maverick said about his dad. “I’ve been rattling off the street names to him as I’m driving back to the hotel, and he knows all of them.”
The family connections to Detroit are intriguing, but all eyes are fixated on Maverick for one reason: to win.
He was playing his best golf in the weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the Tour season: the Farmers Insurance Open (15th), AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am (tied for fifth); Puerto Rico Open (tied for 27th); and The Honda Classic (tied for 11th).
Since golf’s reboot, he tied for 32nd at the Charles Schwab Challenge and tied for 58th at the RBC Heritage.
At the Rocket Mortgage Classic, Maverick is knotted with nine others for 20th after shooting 4 under par in Friday’s second round. Entering the third round, he’s fixated on setting himself up to notch the first Tour victory in family history.
“My round today was pretty sloppy tee to green,” Maverick said, “and then I fought really hard when I got close to the putting surface. Very comfortable on poa annua and bluegrass, bentgrass, all this mix we see around here, it’s stuff I grew up on on the West Coast.
“And I’m excited that if I can start to hit a few more greens, then I can shoot low scores.”
Evan Petzold is a sports reporting intern at the Detroit Free Press, part of the USA Today Network. Contact him at epetzold@gannett.com or follow him on Twitter @EvanPetzold.
