I DON’T HAVE a sporting bucket list — we’d lose whole forests before I’d have enough paper to even get started — but if I did, a trip to each of golf’s four Majors would certainly be on there (along with the Super Bowl, the Olympic 100m final etc etc).
The Open was the most realistic and easily attainable of the four and, unsurprisingly, the first off the list. That 2013 trip to Muirfield wasn’t intended to be the first in a series of annual golf pilgrimages but, then again, you never know when you’ll just happen to be in the right place at the right time.
I mean, if you’re on holidays in America and just happen to be passing through Kentucky as the same time as the PGA Championship, it would not only be rude not to stop. It would be foolish.
You might remember the build-up to this year’s tournament in Valhalla and the 24/7 rolling news updates on Tiger Woods and whether or not he’d be fit to take his place on the first tee. (Maybe that only happened in America, or on the Golf Channel, but it still happened — they had a camera staked out on his parking spot for god’s sake.)
When we arrived for Tuesday’s practice day, talk of Tiger’s whereabouts was still all the rage but another man was causing just as much buzz on the course: the three-time, soon to be four-time, Major champion Rory McIlroy.
The unstructured nature of a practice day can make it hard to keep track of where individual players are on the course. Players skip holes, play multiple balls, join the group in front or behind, and everything is generally slow.
It was easy enough to find Rory. He was the one with a massive crowd in tow, the kind usually reserved for Tiger in his prime.
Remember that he arrived in Valhalla on the back of victories at the Open and the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational and, for the first time in over a year, as the world number one.
As myself and my friends drifted from group to group, pausing only to watch Miguel Angel Jimenez puff away on one of his trademark cigars on the tee box, our Irish accents betrayed us. And every conversation took the same turn: “Is Rory going to win this week?”
By the time dusk fell on Sunday evening and he finally got his hands on the Wanamaker, we were already far away — 1,000 kilometres to be precise, watching from a bar off Bourbon Street in New Orleans.
A small Irish contingent had gathered in one of the few pubs willing to switch the TV to live golf for five hours, savouring another Major. It was all the more special for having been there a few days earlier.
