Golf.com Podcast

Maverick McNealy is the most intriguing young golfer to come along in quite some time. Yes, the kid can play: He spent much of 2016 and '17 as the top-ranked amateur in the country while earning a degree in engineering and management science. But what makes McNealy so unusual is his backstory, as his father Scott is a Silicon Valley legend, having co-founded Sun Microsystems, which was sold to Oracle in 2010 for $7.4 billion. Maverick grew up in gilded circumstances — for years the family kept a mansion on the 16th fairway at Pebble Beach - but he is remarkably self-possessed and down-to-earth. Maverick sat down with Alan Shipnuck in Las Vegas, where he played on a sponsor's exemption and missed the cut. It was the second of seven he is allowed to take as a non-member of the PGA Tour. If he earns 269 FedEx Cup points during these seven starts — equal to the 150th place on the 2017 list — he will become a "special temporary member" of the Tour and be able to accept unlimited sponsor's exemptions for the remain