THE MEASURE OF Rory McIlroy is the fact he hung around Oak Hill to congratulate Brooks Koepka on his PGA Championship, catching him as he left the clubhouse for an embrace and a clap on the back.
This was a sadly familiar forbearance for McIlroy. As Koepka continued on his way to the trophy presentation, McIlroy diverged and headed for home, his head filled with the usual hoard of encouragements and maddening dissuasions.
Once upon a time it seemed Rory McIlroy’s aim was not to conquer his generation but to transcend it: to rack up the major titles and see how they stacked up against Seve, Mickelson, Faldo; or perhaps Palmer, Player and Watson; or hey, perhaps even Woods and Nicklaus.
But it’s been nine years since McIlroy stopped counting and suddenly the ambitions have shrunk from their initially awesome vista.
Now McIlroy is in a battle to be remembered as the best golfer of his generation.
In his righteous staving off of LIV, the general sparkle of his play and the sheer generosity of his spirit, McIlroy will be remembered for doing more for his sport than anyone since Tiger Woods, but legacy’s currency is a cruelly non-transferable.
McIlroy knows this more than anyone. Greatness is measured in major championships.
And now, someone younger than McIlroy has more major titles than him.
Okay, Brooks Koepka is only a year younger than McIlroy, but Koepka’s PGA Championship title at Oak Hill means he has now moved one ahead to five and level with, among others, Seve Ballesteros.
This victory completes Koepka’s redemptive arc, and he admitted after the win that he didn’t know if he would ever again be back here.
The world knows all about Koepka’s struggles thanks to Netflix’s Full Swing.
Koepka, hitherto golf’s Gary Cooper, The Strong Silent Type, spoke with a McIlroyesque candour of his doubts and shattered confidence in the wake of a grotesque knee injury.
“Golf’s so crazy because when you have it, you feel like you’re never gonna lose it. And when you don’t have it, you feel like you’re never gonna get it.”
That injury and its attendant sense of thwarted desire may have driven Koepka’s to LIV, and he revealed the extent of it at the Masters earlier this year.
“I just slipped. I was at home. I dislocated my knee and then I tried to put it back in and that’s when I shattered my kneecap and during the process tore my MPFL (medial patellofemoral ligament). My leg was sideways and out. My foot was turned out, and when I snapped it back in, because the kneecap had already shattered, it went in pretty good. It went in a lot easier.”
Koepka was the third-round leader at the Masters but faded dismally, allowing Jon Rahm take the title and the likes of this writer knock out cheap lines about the LIV guy collapsing after 54 holes.
That disappointment appeared to prove what McIlroy and Jordan Spieth can repeat with a rueful air. It’s one thing to collect majors in a sprint, it’s even harder to pick up another after you’ve gone around the bend.
Koepka, however, opened at Oak Hill with a 72 and then chivvied himself up the leaderboard with a 66 on Friday, after which he spoke gnomically that he knew precisely what he did wrong at Augusta and so would not allow himself to repeat the error. Nobody quite got to the bottom of what he meant, with Trevor Immelman getting closest on ESPN in drawing out an admission from Koepka that he played defensively on the final day at the Masters, spending so long trying not to lose the tournament that he forgot to win it.
It scans.
Koepka was again in the final group at the PGA but this time he went on the attack. He started the day with a one-shot lead over Viktor Hovland and went on the attack, stretching it to two with a trio of early birdies. The front-foot may have got the better of him on six, when he took driver rather than three-wood off the tee and sprayed the ball way right.
He made bogey and then another at seven, but steadied himself with a couple of pars and then a birdie on 10. The signature moment may have been a bogey on 11, however, after he flighted an iron a little too low and heard a malign shout of Fried egg! from the crowd. With the ball plugged right at the front of the bunker, Koepka somehow swiped the ball up and onto the green, where he two-putted for a birdie disguised as a bogey.
Hovland hung tough but finally fell away when he found a bunker on the 16th fairway, eerily hitting the exact chunk as Corey Conners did a day earlier, failing to make it out of the sand and then forced to lay-up onto the fairway. Hovland made double-bogey, and so Koepka walked away with a four-shot lead and a fifth major.
The PGA Tour Twitter account issued a magnificently curt message at the end of it all, inflected with a very ‘wishing-your-ex-boyfriend-congrats-on-his-engagement’ tone.
Brooks Koepka has won his third PGA Championship. pic.twitter.com/epqcxynoat
— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) May 21, 2023
An upcoming front in the PGA/LIV split will be the Ryder Cup, with Mickelson predictably saying LIV players should be allowed play for the USA later this year and captain Zach Johnson dodging the issue with the bizarre justification that it would be “borderline irresponsible” to talk about it now.
If the US want to win, however, Johnson has to pick Koepka. And the issue might even be taken out of Johnson’s hands as Koepka’s win at Oak Hill pushes him so high in the points list that he may not be caught by enough of the PGA’s loyalists.
For Rory, this was another backdoor top-10 in which he didn’t truly compete while leaving most of the watching public reverse engineering the scoreboard with a classic if only.
At the end of his round, McIlroy could describe but not understand his contradictions.
“I feel sort of close and so far away at the same time. It’s a weird feeling.”
The truth about McIlroy’s week at Oak Hill is that there was enough in there to read it any which way you like, a kind of Rorschach test.
You could say he ground his way admirably around a brutal golf course without anything approaching his ‘A’ game. Or you could say he had another big chance to contend for a major title but ruined it all with a series of sloppy errors anytime he might have made a charge for the lead.
McIlroy made a healthy 10 birdies over the weekend, where Koepka made 12. But McIlroy could find no momentum: he followed four of those with a bogey on the very next hole. Then again, he clung on and battled through penal rough when his driving accuracy deserted him at the start of the week.
It is undoubtedly an improvement on the misery of Augusta, however, with another two major titles left to scrap for in 2023.
So while McIlroy will probably find more positives than negatives in his now quarterly major stocktake, Brooks Koepka’s counting is a whole lot easier.
And he doesn’t have any interest in stopping at five.
