"The Golf Upstart of Silicon Valley"

The WSJ's John Paul Newport profiles the top player in college golf, Maverick McNealy, the very lightly-recruited Stanford golfer who started the game late.

In a world where the golfers are getting younger and starting sooner, it's refreshing to read about his different path to elite status.

Which brings us to the family. McNealy’s father, Scott, is an avid golfer, scratch for most of his life, and a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired in 2010 in a $7.4 billion transaction. Scott and his wife Susan had strong ideas about how to raise Maverick and his three younger brothers. Despite the family’s wealth, the boys slept in one room with four twin beds down a wall, barracks style, and did their homework in a specially-built study with a desk along each wall and chairs in the middle. No electronics or phones were allowed in the bedroom, ever. “We wanted them to do stuff that’s productive. Get used to being productive. Productive is fun,” McNealy told me this week.

As for sports, they were priority number two, behind academics. “We don’t let them be single-sport athletes. I don’t believe in that,” McNealy said. “Sports are fun. That’s what they’re supposed to be, although we seem to have lost that. The reason I think Mav is doing so well in golf now is because he knows it’s a game. We taught them to love the game, not work at the game.” Family vacations in Palm Springs, Calif., often consisted of dawn-to-dusk golf. Maverick said that he and his father have played 72 holes a day together multiple times.