October 12, 2007
Adminstaff Small Business Classic
Mark William McNulty (born 25 October 1953) is a
professional golfer currently playing on the
Champions Tour. He was one of the leading players on
the European Tour from the mid 1980s to the mid
1990s, and cracked the top 10 of the Official World
Golf Rankings for 83 weeks from 1987 to 1992.
McNulty was born in Bindura, Rhodesia (now known as
Zimbabwe), but he became a citizen of the Republic
of Ireland in 2003 at the age of 50. He was eligible
to do so because his maternal grandmother was born
in Ballymena in Northern Ireland. He explained that
his reason for doing so was that he was concerned
that as a non-resident Zimbabwean it could take him
up to two years to get his passport renewed if he
lost it. Despite his citizenship, the European
Tour's website states that he lives in Sunningdale,
England. Sunningdale is in a wealthy town in the
"stockbroker belt" to the west of London. Several of
England's top courses are in this area and the likes
of Ernie Els and Nick Faldo live nearby.
After a successful amateur career, McNulty began his
professional career on the Southern African Tour,
now the Sunshine Tour and he also played on the
European Tour from 1978. His first professional win
was the 1979 Holiday Inns Royal Swazi Sun Open in
South Africa. By 1986 he was the dominant player on
the Southern African Tour, picking up seven official
wins in that year and also winning South Africa's
most lucrative event, the unofficial Million Dollar
Challenge. In the same year he finished in the top
ten on the European Tour's order of merit for the
first time, placing sixth. He had six top ten
European order of merit finishes in total, including
second places in 1987 and 1990. The last of these
was in 1996, when he came fifth. His win tally on
the European Tour was sixteen, the most prestigious
of which was the 1996 Volvo Masters, which is the
European equivalent of the PGA Tour's Tour
Championship. He won the Sunshine Tour Order of
Merit nine times: 1980/81, 1981/82, 1984/85,
1985/86, 1986/87, 1992/93, 1996/97, 1997/98,
2000/01.
McNulty continued to perform consistently through
his forties, apart from a couple of disappointing
seasons. When he turned fifty and became eligible to
play senior golf he chose to take part in the U.S.
based Champions Tour. His first full season in 2004
was highly successful with three wins including the
senior "tour championship" (the Charles Schwab Cup),
and a seventh place finish on the money list. In
2007 he won the JELD-WEN Tradition, one of the five
major championships on the over-50 tour. It was
McNulty's sixth career win on the Champions Tour.
McNulty lists his interests as piano, fine arts and
koi fish.
