YOU SHOULDN’T REALLY hear anything about Rory McIlroy this week, given that he has taken time off to prepare for the Masters.
But this is Rory McIlroy we’re talking about, so there’s every chance he could get injured, married, sued or knighted in the off week before Augusta.
McIlroy is one of those people that stuff just seems to happen around. Since hitting the big time at the turn of this decade, his professional, personal and business lives have all been a succession of twists and turns, of dramatic headlines and surprising decisions. All for a man whose job, according to his Twitter profile, is to “hit a little white ball around a field sometimes.”
At first glance this looks like the by-product of celebrity culture, where every move, tweet or bicep curl of one of the world’s biggest sports stars becomes a story. But in reality the constant ‘stuff happening’ is down to McIlroy’s desire to shape the world to his needs, and an internal struggle that makes him the most fascinating golfer of his generation.
“It’s a natural tendency for me to be too nice,” McIlroy told Golf Digest prior to last year’s Masters.
“To be a little too giving to be able to focus on what you need to do, and sometimes I have to cut that back. Sometimes, I wish I had a little more of my mum’s reserve,” said McIlroy, referring to his similarity in sunny disposition to his father, Gerry.
McIlroy’s career to date, and the succession of newsworthy incidents packed into it, tells of that battle between the two sides of his nature.
His bitter fallout with Horizon Sports Management came after what had started like a buddy tale out of Entourage. McIlroy and his good friend Graeme McDowell, a bunch of young, like-minded Dublin sports business whizzes, a boozy Christmas party, a contract. Taking Nike for $100 million. Exhilarating stuff.
Except Rory wasn’t sure. Whatever it was that specifically irked him about the direction of his commercial life with Horizon, the split spoke of unhappiness about having any part of his world shaped by others, or at least those outside his closest circle. It cost him dear to get that control back – a reported €20m – but, as his uncle Brian told Golf Digest, “Rory told me, ‘I want it to sting. It will remind me never to make that same mistake again.’”
McIlroy’s relationship with Caroline Wozniacki was the high point of his celebrity rollercoaster period, a very public and rather sweet courtship – until those infamous wedding invitations went out. Rather than drift into marriage just because things were kind of heading that way, McIlroy pulled back, and veered in a more selfish and, as it turned out, wildly successful direction.
“I’ve put a little bit more time into my golf…I just immersed myself in my game,” he said, after subsequently winning the Open, WGC-Bridgestone Invitational and PGA Championship in successive 2014 starts. His ungallant bout of cold feet was another case of Nasty Rory trumping Nice Rory.
George Bernard Shaw said “the reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” McIlroy was raised to be amiable, polite and eager to please, but it is his unreasonable self, the one that ditched Horizon and Wozniacki, that wins Majors, making courses and opponents yield to his will.
Yet it’s clear he still needs that inner battle between ‘immersing’ himself in golf and enjoying some sort of normal life to play itself out. The five-a-side football match that cost him the defence of his Open title last summer was a case in point. The debate that followed centred on whether McIlroy was to be praised for attempting to behave like a regular 26-year-old, or to be chastised for negligence toward his immense talent.
The man himself was relatively defiant: “It’s something I’ve done my whole life… I’m not going to stop doing it.”
And so to Augusta. This week, McIlroy revealed that he wouldn’t be playing the Masters Par 3 competition because it was “too much hassle”, having larked about in the pre-tournament warm-up with Wozniacki and Niall Horan in previous years. Add that to his well-publicised gym obsession and fine-tuned putting grip and it’s clear: this time, it’s all business.
Will it work? All the stuff that just seems to happen to McIlroy, all the big headline-making decisions spring from the struggle between easy-going, well-balanced Rory, and McIlroy the focused, ferocious competitor. Ultimately this conflict is always about getting his head in the right place to win golf tournaments.
The fact that putting – the true mental crucible of golf – remains the only weakness in McIlroy’s game reflects how hitting the psychological sweet spot is key to his success. McIlroy still doesn’t know exactly how to get the right balance between golfer and human being, but on those occasions when he stumbles upon it, he is unstoppable.
In the meantime he’ll continue to try to shape his life to suit the two sides to his personality, and stuff will just seem to keep happening to him.
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