#01aug19

The importance of the women's game is huge. If you grow the women's game, you grow golf, as far as I'm concerned. There's so much talent out there. I watch college golf on a weekly basis, I was at the Augusta National Women's Amateur and you can see the talent that just doesn't always get seen on TV. That's what we need to change, if we can get girls on TV more and doing stuff with sponsors like Charley Hull with ISPS Handa, that's how you grow the game. Hopefully when we get to Galgorm Castle in August, we can bring more females through the gates as well.

It's happening quite a lot actually. More than I thought. I'll be doing meet and greets with people on the street and one or two people will come up to me and say they started playing because I play golf. It's exactly why I wanted to start Modest! Golf and be involved with the ISPS Handa World Invitational. I met this girl in the street in Los Angeles a few weeks ago and she started playing golf seven or eight years ago after seeing me play it and now she's in the junior team at the University of Southern California. She's going to be in one of the top college teams in the country! If I can have a small percentage of my following say that to me then golf is in good shape.

I've always been in love with golf and only in the last five or six years have I thought that I could maybe do something to help, and now watching it turn out like this is really mad. The company has been flying, the guys have been doing really good work and we've just taken on a new member of staff. You want people around you who actually want to change the game and I'll take that description as 'one of the most influential people in golf ' because I'm in it for the right reasons. I want to see this game succeed. I'm not going to move the needle massively, but I'd say with 40 million followers and about 90 per cent of them being female, I'd like to think that we can pull a couple of per cent of them into the game.

The one statement that always made me think was that if you think you're working hard then there are 100 lads out there working 20 times harder than you. I don't know whether that helped, but our lads are starting to turn the corner now and the hard work is really starting to pay off. I know personally how hard they work and seeing it pay off is a really special thing. You have to work hard. We wanted to keep it small and we want every player to represent us as a brand. The reason we started was to grow the game and we want to see hard-working young lads and girls.