The winning moment. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
THE GLORIOUS FACT about Rory McIlroy’s Masters victory: the moment of triumph was exactly as we had imagined.
His tossing of his club. . . his crumpling to the ground. . . his great gasp and heave of mammoth relief. . . the shadow of his clenched body made long by that unique yellow shade of Augusta’s evening sun. . . yes, if it was ever going to happen, it was going to look like this.
We think we want our favourite sportspeople to surprise us, but that’s not true. No, we want them to deliver precisely what we envisage and expect, and in 2025, Rory McIlroy fulfilled our demanding contract.
***
Here’s the first contract we draft: youthful talent and ambition instantly inherits great expectation.
Rory McIlroy’s talent was no secret by the time he was chipping golf balls into a washing machine on live television when he was eight years of age.
He didn’t hide his ambition, either. When McIlroy was 16, for instance, he blew away the field at the European Amateur Youth Championships in Italy, leading wire to wire to book a place at The Open in Carnoustie.
After it was all done, he quietly told some of his Irish team mates that he was disappointed, as he wanted to beat Tiger. When they looked at Woods’ winning score at the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational at Firestone that week, they found McIlroy had finished four shots worse off.
Nobody deals easily with mass expectation, especially golfers, given it’s the most difficult sport in which to win. When Paul McGinley turned pro he asked Jack Nicklaus for advice. “‘Paul, good luck in your career,” said Nicklaus. “Just remember one thing: I spent 90% of my time losing in my career and I am the most successful player ever to play the game.”
Watching McIlroy navigate his own circus at Royal Portrush earlier this year was to watch a guy who had just about figured out how to deal with the pressure that comes bound up with adulation.
In 2019, he stayed away from the course in an effort to limit his exposure to the madness, but no sparring meant he was caught cold by the full wallop of expectation when he arrived on the first tee. This year he decided it was better to stay close to the course and indulge as many selfies and autographs as he could.
“I think it’s better for everyone if I embrace it,” he said. “I think it’s better for me because it’s nice to be able to accept adulation, even though I struggle with it at times.”
Nicklaus delivered its heaviest dose.
In winning the 2014 PGA Championship beneath fading light at Valhalla, McIlroy became only the third man to win four majors by the age of 25, following Nicklaus and Woods. “I think Rory has an opportunity to win 15 or 20 majors,” said Nicklaus in the week McIlroy won his fourth.
Nicklaus didn’t say so, but McIlroy’s pace looked unreasonable because it was. This was McIlroy’s hot hand, a la Bob Dylan’s 18 months in the mid-sixties when he wrote and recorded Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. Dylan then crashed his motorbike, recovered, and wrote a memoir of how he could never quite recapture the magic.
McIlroy wins major number four in almost record-setting time. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Maybe it was an ankle injury suffered during a football game which ended McIlroy’s hot streak. Either way, he wasn’t fit to defend the Claret Jug in 2015 and by the time he wept having missed the cut at Portrush he hadn’t won a major in five years. For a long time he wasn’t close to another major and then he seemed to be forever, painfully close.
The 2022 Open, where he two-putted every green and was caught by Cam Smith, who snatched the Claret Jug on his sprint to LIV.
The 2023 US Open, where his impatience got the better of him in hitting a wedge to the 14th green during a quick gust of wind, making bogey to lose by a shot to Wyndham Clark.
The 2024 US Open, where he made it plain that this was now a mental problem in missing from three feet for the first time in 496 attempts, losing by a shot to Bryson DeChambeau.
There followed a series of second-tier heartbreaks: the Irish Open at Royal County Down; the BMW PGA at Wentworth; the failed tilt at an Olympic medal after which he wheezed he had become golf’s nearly man.
He continued to be unerringly consistent, of course, continually picking up PGA Tour titles and the DP World order of merit gong, while almost never dropping outside the world’s top 10.
But truly we only cared about the majors: another raw term of the contract.
So when he won the Players Championship in March, he didn’t have time to celebrate it before he was being asked about it in the context of the following month’s Masters.
That victory pointed to his having all the tools to win the Masters. His driving was always a superpower, and he had long since turned himself into one of the world’s most consistent putters. Now he was showing more control and variety with his wedges and short irons, using a “three-quarter three-quarter” shot (where backswing and speed are at 75%) to find the treacherous island green on 17th hole in the play-off where poor JJ Spaun flipped his ball into the water.
Nobody had ever been subjected to this level of noise around their failure to win a single event. But by this year McIlroy had learned to deal with all of this expectation: just let it in. Nobody wins big without agreeing to risk losing big.
After the ’23 US Open near-miss, McIlroy said, “I would go through 100 Sundays like this to get my hands on another major championship”.
***
The first three days of the Masters are a battle against everyone else.
Their noise; their demands; their expectation.
It has been a long eight months since the last major, and so every golfer must deal with more talk and nobody has to deal with as much of it as McIlroy, and why he can’t win at Augusta National.
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Nick Faldo believes his wedge play wasn’t good enough. Brandel Chamblee says he struggles to hit it off a hook lie. Nicklaus says couldn’t keep his focus. Trevor Immelman says he gets too aggressive.
How to swing free through all this chatter?
Much of the noise around McIlroy coalesces into a demand to make a fast start. The demanders point to the stats: Tiger Woods is the only tournament winner since 2004 to finish outside the top 10 at the end of the first round while McIlroy usually starts slowly, and has been among the top 10 at the end of the first day’s play on three occasions only.
McGinley is among the legion to posit the theory that McIlroy’s slow starts are a kind of pre-emptive strike against expectation. Why spend four days dealing with this awful pressure when you can take yourself out of it on day one, and chase freely if hopelessly for the rest of the week?
This year, he starts well. Through 14 holes he is bogey-free, tied for second, and staring down a long par-five with a chance to cut into Justin Rose’s three-shot lead. But McIlroy sees his approach shot bounce off a brand-new and fiendishly firm green, and roll down the slope behind. His next shot back doesn’t grab and instead goes into the water. Double-bogey.
He goes on to 17, clubs down off the tee, but flies the back of the green with his approach, and is left with another brutal up-and-down. Double-bogey.
No Masters champion since 1982 has made more than one double bogey across their four rounds, and McIlroy made two in three holes. He is tied 27th, seven shots off the lead.
But another lesson of Augusta National: there is no point in trying to impress everybody. The place frowns superciliously on anything so base as desperation, and this is why patrons around the course are not allowed to run, while a sure-fire means of never becoming a member is of asking to become a member.
The club has a strict code of behaviour for its guests and the course demands the same of its golfers. Get too desperate and aggressive in the wrong places around here and you’ll be finding water and Tetris shapes on your scorecard. Hence the lesson: don’t get too eager and don’t go trying to please everyone here, because there is no impressing us.
McIlroy emerges on Friday and for once doesn’t get desperate. He plays steadily, with eight pars and a birdie on the first par-five. Then he gently pushes the throttle: birdie-birdie-par-eagle-par-birdie and home in 66.
On Saturday he pushes that throttle as far as it can go and opens with Three. Three. Three. Three. Three. Three. Home with another 66.
He takes a two-shot lead into the final day of the Masters. In a snap post-interview on Sky Sports, he is asked about how he deal with the long night and morning ahead of him and admits there will be some nerves. I swear I hear his voice squeak right on the word ‘nerves’.
***
McIlroy has learned across his career that there’s no means of keeping other people happy all the time. He is, of course, from Northern Ireland: the land of grudging consensus; a place built on a refusal to keep everyone happy.
McIlroy signs a Northern Ireland flag at this year's Open Championship at Royal Portrush. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
That doesn’t mean he didn’t try to do so for a while. Golf’s return to the Olympics for Rio 2016 forced him to choose who to represent, later saying he resented the Games for forcing him to do so. Amid the more agonising moments, in lamenting the fact he couldn’t simply represent Northern Ireland, he said he was raised “feeling more British than Irish”.
“Whatever I do,” he later said, “I know my decision is going to upset some people.”
He eventually picked the golf route out of the problem, basing his decision to represent Ireland on the fact the sport is organised here on an all-island basis. “I’ve spent seven years trying to please everyone and I figured out that I can’t really do that,” he said having come to his decision. “So I may as well be true to myself.”
I still get emails and comments from people who won’t forgive him for not draping himself in a tricolour from the moment Pat Hickey came calling.
But McIlroy didn’t say he didn’t feel at all Irish, or that he was 100% British – there was a mingling – however uneven – of both. And in 1998 we voted overwhelmingly to recognise the fact of this ambiguity.
And no sportsperson has done more to elevate and reinforce that ambiguity of national identity. A dual winner of RTÉ and BBC’s sports personality of the year awards in the same year. The future knight of the realm who made eagle on the 72nd hole of the Irish Open to one of the loudest roars recorded in any sporting arena this year.
All of the ideas and stories we tell ourselves about national identity need to be renewed every so often with acts of public re-enactment. In showing how many people have willingly staked an investment in his successes and failures, McIlroy has more than played his part in this.
And he has done it all by, in his own words, staying true to himself.
For the profound truth of his long and magnificent career still belongs to his former caddie, JP Fitzgerald.
You’re Rory McIlroy, what the fuck are you doing!?
Those intra-major years we call his drought were exacerbated by the excessive influence of people not named Rory McIlroy. He fell out of the world’s top 10 in 2018 but 2021 may have been the nadir, at the end of which he wept at not delivering for Pádraig Harrington and the European Ryder Cup team after a historic defeat at Whistling Straits.
Despite the fact he was the second-longest driver on the planet, he had lost focus chasing Bryson DeChambeau down a rabbit hole.
You’re Rory McIlroy, what the fuck are you doing!?
But, within a month, he had found the light.
“I feel the last couple weeks I’ve realised that just being me is good enough, and maybe the last few months I was trying…not trying to be someone else, but maybe trying to add things to my game or take things away from my game,” he said. “I’m capable of winning a lot of events on the PGA Tour and being the best player in the world.”
He had at that point busied himself with becoming one of the best putters in the world, thanks to the work of Brad Faxon. At their first session together, Faxon handed McIlroy a five-wood and asked him to hit three putts from eight feet. He sank them all. The lesson, said McIlroy, was to forget all you have learned about technique and go back to instinct.
His sports psychologist passed on similar advice, too, who tells him to chase a feeling on the course, rather than a score. “It’s the feeling of childlike joy and enthusiasm”, McIlroy told The Shotgun Start podcast at the end of the year. “I wasn’t one for school, so the last couple of classes I’d be thinking of getting out and going up to Holywood Golf Club to play until dark. Once you get out on the course, it’s like an adventure: you’re chasing this ball and you’re seeing shots and you are so in the moment and in tune with your senses.”
Shane Lowry is working with Rotella too and it’s been notable how often he too has talked in interviews of the importance of simply remaining true to himself, given it was Lowry’s authentic self that got him this far.
This was the privilege of watching McIlroy and Lowry’s hours-long public trial in their fourball match on Saturday at the Ryder Cup.
Despite the grandstands and the rows of spiteful crowds and the celebrities and the rivers of armed police, it was like being brought back to some quotidien scene on an Irish fairway somewhere more than two decades earlier, as these two talented kids joked and laughed and yelled and pumped their fists just like everyone else did. They haven’t changed, even if everything and everyone around them has.
Their match now stands out to me as one of the greatest exhibitions of sheer character in Irish sporting history, and to everyone else as the lowest moment of a Ryder Cup wrecked by boorish abuse, but to the two men in the middle of it, it was merely a few of the more public hours contained within decades of shared personal history. Which is why they had the strength to endure it.
McIlroy’s lesson was written by Dylan during that hot hand run.
I was so much older then, but I’m younger than that now.
Lowry and McIlroy celebrate Ryder Cup triumph at Bethpage. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
***
Sunday at The Masters is a battle against yourself.
In the lead-up to the tournament McIlroy had sat down with Nicklaus and used the great man as his compass as he orienteered his cautiously way around the course. If he was going to finally get this thing done, it seemed he had finally listened to everyone’s advice on how to play it.
He then double-bogeys the first hole, instantly loses his lead and feels what Norman Mailer described as the sense of relief that greets the setting in of total disaster. He reminds himself that Jon Rahm won two years earlier having made a double on his first hole. He didn’t linger on the fact Rahm made that double on Thursday.
He leaves the second hole one behind, but he is happily duelling with a scratchy DeChambeau, so reclaims his lead and in fact extends it to three by the time he goes left on seven. Harry Diamond counsels him to play safely back onto the fairway, but McIlroy is eyeing a gap between the trees like a puppy eyeing meat on the countertop.
He makes the shot and bounces away, laughing with Harry. He is four up by the time he arrives at 13 and decides to play as cautiously as everyone had been telling him to. Then he flops his ball into the creek and McIlroy has just found his most baroque method yet of fucking away The Masters.
Johan Cruyff once gnomically explained his poor record from spot kicks by saying, “the difficult thing about penalties is that they are so easy.”
Happily McIlroy goes left on 15 and leaves himself with a ludicrously difficult shot. . . and so he whips the ball around a tree and leaves it to eight feet for eagle.
You’re Rory McIlroy, what the fuck are you doing!?
It is at this point that it’s clear what we are witnessing is a display of genius in its truest sense. It can only be beaten if things are too easy.
He gets to 18 needing only a par for The Masters but once again he decides to be somebody else, bailing out safely to the right of the pin. But he bails out too far and he ends up with a bogey and a play-off against Justin Rose.
Rose then does the wrong thing in the play-off: he hits a terrific second shot as a prelude to another birdie look. And so, from almost exactly the same place from which he went into the bunker a few minutes earlier, Rory McIlroy is forced to hit the Rory McIlroy shot.
He leaves it to four feet. He makes the putt. He’s done it. He has actually gone and done it.
“My battle today”, he says beneath a green jacket, “was with myself.”
***
Nick Faldo, Wayne Reilly, Butch Harmon. . . none of Sky Sports’ wise voices could explains why Sunday’s pin on 16 was in a different spot than usual. Ordinarily it is on the bottom left, laid low and down near the water, from where Lowry can feed in a hole-in-one or Tiger can chip in from the back of the green. This time, though, it’s hoisted up on the back right of the green, and nobody can quite understand why.
And then, during the course of McIlroy’s victorious interview in Augusta National’s walnut-walled press room, he nonchalantly solves the riddle in passing.
“I think the one hole that I was not worried about but was sort of in the back of my mind was 16 because that was an unusual Sunday pin on 16, probably for the 50th anniversary of Jack holing that in ’75.”
At which point I wanted to scream, No wonder you found this thing so damn hard to win!
How can anyone so exquisitely attuned to golf history not make a burden of their opportunity for entrance to golf’s most hallowed hall of all? We all think we know what winning the Grand Slam would mean, but Rory McIlroy knew what it actually meant.
If he didn’t, chances are he would have won the 2025 Masters without needing that play-off. He wouldn’t have made a pair of double-bogeys on his final round, and he probably wouldn’t have made the Thursday pair, either. In fact, he’d have probably won at least a couple of green jackets before this year, too. Sunday in 2011 might have been a day of prodigious glory, and not the day of original sin.
Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
But if he had won it more easily and earlier in his career, then we wouldn’t really have cared about it. It certainly wouldn’t stand out in our collective memories as such a visceral, exhausting experience. It is because it meant so much to him that he found it so difficult.
There is no glory in the struggle: the glory is the struggle.
And the struggle comes from caring too much.
If we are to invest our time and emotions into anything, the sportsperson involved must be first to do so; they have to underwrite our investment.
And this is the achievement of Rory McIlroy in the 2025: he faithfully fulfilled this contract, proving that sport remains worthy of freighting with illogical meaning.
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What I think about when I think about Rory McIlroy in 2025
THE GLORIOUS FACT about Rory McIlroy’s Masters victory: the moment of triumph was exactly as we had imagined.
His tossing of his club. . . his crumpling to the ground. . . his great gasp and heave of mammoth relief. . . the shadow of his clenched body made long by that unique yellow shade of Augusta’s evening sun. . . yes, if it was ever going to happen, it was going to look like this.
We think we want our favourite sportspeople to surprise us, but that’s not true. No, we want them to deliver precisely what we envisage and expect, and in 2025, Rory McIlroy fulfilled our demanding contract.
***
Here’s the first contract we draft: youthful talent and ambition instantly inherits great expectation.
Rory McIlroy’s talent was no secret by the time he was chipping golf balls into a washing machine on live television when he was eight years of age.
He didn’t hide his ambition, either. When McIlroy was 16, for instance, he blew away the field at the European Amateur Youth Championships in Italy, leading wire to wire to book a place at The Open in Carnoustie.
After it was all done, he quietly told some of his Irish team mates that he was disappointed, as he wanted to beat Tiger. When they looked at Woods’ winning score at the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational at Firestone that week, they found McIlroy had finished four shots worse off.
Nobody deals easily with mass expectation, especially golfers, given it’s the most difficult sport in which to win. When Paul McGinley turned pro he asked Jack Nicklaus for advice. “‘Paul, good luck in your career,” said Nicklaus. “Just remember one thing: I spent 90% of my time losing in my career and I am the most successful player ever to play the game.”
Watching McIlroy navigate his own circus at Royal Portrush earlier this year was to watch a guy who had just about figured out how to deal with the pressure that comes bound up with adulation.
In 2019, he stayed away from the course in an effort to limit his exposure to the madness, but no sparring meant he was caught cold by the full wallop of expectation when he arrived on the first tee. This year he decided it was better to stay close to the course and indulge as many selfies and autographs as he could.
“I think it’s better for everyone if I embrace it,” he said. “I think it’s better for me because it’s nice to be able to accept adulation, even though I struggle with it at times.”
Nicklaus delivered its heaviest dose.
In winning the 2014 PGA Championship beneath fading light at Valhalla, McIlroy became only the third man to win four majors by the age of 25, following Nicklaus and Woods. “I think Rory has an opportunity to win 15 or 20 majors,” said Nicklaus in the week McIlroy won his fourth.
Nicklaus didn’t say so, but McIlroy’s pace looked unreasonable because it was. This was McIlroy’s hot hand, a la Bob Dylan’s 18 months in the mid-sixties when he wrote and recorded Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. Dylan then crashed his motorbike, recovered, and wrote a memoir of how he could never quite recapture the magic.
Maybe it was an ankle injury suffered during a football game which ended McIlroy’s hot streak. Either way, he wasn’t fit to defend the Claret Jug in 2015 and by the time he wept having missed the cut at Portrush he hadn’t won a major in five years. For a long time he wasn’t close to another major and then he seemed to be forever, painfully close.
The 2022 Open, where he two-putted every green and was caught by Cam Smith, who snatched the Claret Jug on his sprint to LIV.
The 2023 US Open, where his impatience got the better of him in hitting a wedge to the 14th green during a quick gust of wind, making bogey to lose by a shot to Wyndham Clark.
The 2024 US Open, where he made it plain that this was now a mental problem in missing from three feet for the first time in 496 attempts, losing by a shot to Bryson DeChambeau.
There followed a series of second-tier heartbreaks: the Irish Open at Royal County Down; the BMW PGA at Wentworth; the failed tilt at an Olympic medal after which he wheezed he had become golf’s nearly man.
He continued to be unerringly consistent, of course, continually picking up PGA Tour titles and the DP World order of merit gong, while almost never dropping outside the world’s top 10.
But truly we only cared about the majors: another raw term of the contract.
So when he won the Players Championship in March, he didn’t have time to celebrate it before he was being asked about it in the context of the following month’s Masters.
That victory pointed to his having all the tools to win the Masters. His driving was always a superpower, and he had long since turned himself into one of the world’s most consistent putters. Now he was showing more control and variety with his wedges and short irons, using a “three-quarter three-quarter” shot (where backswing and speed are at 75%) to find the treacherous island green on 17th hole in the play-off where poor JJ Spaun flipped his ball into the water.
Nobody had ever been subjected to this level of noise around their failure to win a single event. But by this year McIlroy had learned to deal with all of this expectation: just let it in. Nobody wins big without agreeing to risk losing big.
After the ’23 US Open near-miss, McIlroy said, “I would go through 100 Sundays like this to get my hands on another major championship”.
***
The first three days of the Masters are a battle against everyone else.
Their noise; their demands; their expectation.
It has been a long eight months since the last major, and so every golfer must deal with more talk and nobody has to deal with as much of it as McIlroy, and why he can’t win at Augusta National.
Nick Faldo believes his wedge play wasn’t good enough. Brandel Chamblee says he struggles to hit it off a hook lie. Nicklaus says couldn’t keep his focus. Trevor Immelman says he gets too aggressive.
How to swing free through all this chatter?
Much of the noise around McIlroy coalesces into a demand to make a fast start. The demanders point to the stats: Tiger Woods is the only tournament winner since 2004 to finish outside the top 10 at the end of the first round while McIlroy usually starts slowly, and has been among the top 10 at the end of the first day’s play on three occasions only.
McGinley is among the legion to posit the theory that McIlroy’s slow starts are a kind of pre-emptive strike against expectation. Why spend four days dealing with this awful pressure when you can take yourself out of it on day one, and chase freely if hopelessly for the rest of the week?
This year, he starts well. Through 14 holes he is bogey-free, tied for second, and staring down a long par-five with a chance to cut into Justin Rose’s three-shot lead. But McIlroy sees his approach shot bounce off a brand-new and fiendishly firm green, and roll down the slope behind. His next shot back doesn’t grab and instead goes into the water. Double-bogey.
He goes on to 17, clubs down off the tee, but flies the back of the green with his approach, and is left with another brutal up-and-down. Double-bogey.
No Masters champion since 1982 has made more than one double bogey across their four rounds, and McIlroy made two in three holes. He is tied 27th, seven shots off the lead.
But another lesson of Augusta National: there is no point in trying to impress everybody. The place frowns superciliously on anything so base as desperation, and this is why patrons around the course are not allowed to run, while a sure-fire means of never becoming a member is of asking to become a member.
The club has a strict code of behaviour for its guests and the course demands the same of its golfers. Get too desperate and aggressive in the wrong places around here and you’ll be finding water and Tetris shapes on your scorecard. Hence the lesson: don’t get too eager and don’t go trying to please everyone here, because there is no impressing us.
McIlroy emerges on Friday and for once doesn’t get desperate. He plays steadily, with eight pars and a birdie on the first par-five. Then he gently pushes the throttle: birdie-birdie-par-eagle-par-birdie and home in 66.
On Saturday he pushes that throttle as far as it can go and opens with Three. Three. Three. Three. Three. Three. Home with another 66.
He takes a two-shot lead into the final day of the Masters. In a snap post-interview on Sky Sports, he is asked about how he deal with the long night and morning ahead of him and admits there will be some nerves. I swear I hear his voice squeak right on the word ‘nerves’.
***
McIlroy has learned across his career that there’s no means of keeping other people happy all the time. He is, of course, from Northern Ireland: the land of grudging consensus; a place built on a refusal to keep everyone happy.
That doesn’t mean he didn’t try to do so for a while. Golf’s return to the Olympics for Rio 2016 forced him to choose who to represent, later saying he resented the Games for forcing him to do so. Amid the more agonising moments, in lamenting the fact he couldn’t simply represent Northern Ireland, he said he was raised “feeling more British than Irish”.
“Whatever I do,” he later said, “I know my decision is going to upset some people.”
He eventually picked the golf route out of the problem, basing his decision to represent Ireland on the fact the sport is organised here on an all-island basis. “I’ve spent seven years trying to please everyone and I figured out that I can’t really do that,” he said having come to his decision. “So I may as well be true to myself.”
I still get emails and comments from people who won’t forgive him for not draping himself in a tricolour from the moment Pat Hickey came calling.
But McIlroy didn’t say he didn’t feel at all Irish, or that he was 100% British – there was a mingling – however uneven – of both. And in 1998 we voted overwhelmingly to recognise the fact of this ambiguity.
And no sportsperson has done more to elevate and reinforce that ambiguity of national identity. A dual winner of RTÉ and BBC’s sports personality of the year awards in the same year. The future knight of the realm who made eagle on the 72nd hole of the Irish Open to one of the loudest roars recorded in any sporting arena this year.
All of the ideas and stories we tell ourselves about national identity need to be renewed every so often with acts of public re-enactment. In showing how many people have willingly staked an investment in his successes and failures, McIlroy has more than played his part in this.
And he has done it all by, in his own words, staying true to himself.
For the profound truth of his long and magnificent career still belongs to his former caddie, JP Fitzgerald.
You’re Rory McIlroy, what the fuck are you doing!?
Those intra-major years we call his drought were exacerbated by the excessive influence of people not named Rory McIlroy. He fell out of the world’s top 10 in 2018 but 2021 may have been the nadir, at the end of which he wept at not delivering for Pádraig Harrington and the European Ryder Cup team after a historic defeat at Whistling Straits.
Despite the fact he was the second-longest driver on the planet, he had lost focus chasing Bryson DeChambeau down a rabbit hole.
You’re Rory McIlroy, what the fuck are you doing!?
But, within a month, he had found the light.
“I feel the last couple weeks I’ve realised that just being me is good enough, and maybe the last few months I was trying…not trying to be someone else, but maybe trying to add things to my game or take things away from my game,” he said. “I’m capable of winning a lot of events on the PGA Tour and being the best player in the world.”
He had at that point busied himself with becoming one of the best putters in the world, thanks to the work of Brad Faxon. At their first session together, Faxon handed McIlroy a five-wood and asked him to hit three putts from eight feet. He sank them all. The lesson, said McIlroy, was to forget all you have learned about technique and go back to instinct.
His sports psychologist passed on similar advice, too, who tells him to chase a feeling on the course, rather than a score. “It’s the feeling of childlike joy and enthusiasm”, McIlroy told The Shotgun Start podcast at the end of the year. “I wasn’t one for school, so the last couple of classes I’d be thinking of getting out and going up to Holywood Golf Club to play until dark. Once you get out on the course, it’s like an adventure: you’re chasing this ball and you’re seeing shots and you are so in the moment and in tune with your senses.”
Shane Lowry is working with Rotella too and it’s been notable how often he too has talked in interviews of the importance of simply remaining true to himself, given it was Lowry’s authentic self that got him this far.
This was the privilege of watching McIlroy and Lowry’s hours-long public trial in their fourball match on Saturday at the Ryder Cup.
Despite the grandstands and the rows of spiteful crowds and the celebrities and the rivers of armed police, it was like being brought back to some quotidien scene on an Irish fairway somewhere more than two decades earlier, as these two talented kids joked and laughed and yelled and pumped their fists just like everyone else did. They haven’t changed, even if everything and everyone around them has.
Their match now stands out to me as one of the greatest exhibitions of sheer character in Irish sporting history, and to everyone else as the lowest moment of a Ryder Cup wrecked by boorish abuse, but to the two men in the middle of it, it was merely a few of the more public hours contained within decades of shared personal history. Which is why they had the strength to endure it.
McIlroy’s lesson was written by Dylan during that hot hand run.
I was so much older then, but I’m younger than that now.
***
Sunday at The Masters is a battle against yourself.
In the lead-up to the tournament McIlroy had sat down with Nicklaus and used the great man as his compass as he orienteered his cautiously way around the course. If he was going to finally get this thing done, it seemed he had finally listened to everyone’s advice on how to play it.
He then double-bogeys the first hole, instantly loses his lead and feels what Norman Mailer described as the sense of relief that greets the setting in of total disaster. He reminds himself that Jon Rahm won two years earlier having made a double on his first hole. He didn’t linger on the fact Rahm made that double on Thursday.
He leaves the second hole one behind, but he is happily duelling with a scratchy DeChambeau, so reclaims his lead and in fact extends it to three by the time he goes left on seven. Harry Diamond counsels him to play safely back onto the fairway, but McIlroy is eyeing a gap between the trees like a puppy eyeing meat on the countertop.
He makes the shot and bounces away, laughing with Harry. He is four up by the time he arrives at 13 and decides to play as cautiously as everyone had been telling him to. Then he flops his ball into the creek and McIlroy has just found his most baroque method yet of fucking away The Masters.
Johan Cruyff once gnomically explained his poor record from spot kicks by saying, “the difficult thing about penalties is that they are so easy.”
Happily McIlroy goes left on 15 and leaves himself with a ludicrously difficult shot. . . and so he whips the ball around a tree and leaves it to eight feet for eagle.
You’re Rory McIlroy, what the fuck are you doing!?
It is at this point that it’s clear what we are witnessing is a display of genius in its truest sense. It can only be beaten if things are too easy.
He gets to 18 needing only a par for The Masters but once again he decides to be somebody else, bailing out safely to the right of the pin. But he bails out too far and he ends up with a bogey and a play-off against Justin Rose.
Rose then does the wrong thing in the play-off: he hits a terrific second shot as a prelude to another birdie look. And so, from almost exactly the same place from which he went into the bunker a few minutes earlier, Rory McIlroy is forced to hit the Rory McIlroy shot.
He leaves it to four feet. He makes the putt. He’s done it. He has actually gone and done it.
“My battle today”, he says beneath a green jacket, “was with myself.”
***
Nick Faldo, Wayne Reilly, Butch Harmon. . . none of Sky Sports’ wise voices could explains why Sunday’s pin on 16 was in a different spot than usual. Ordinarily it is on the bottom left, laid low and down near the water, from where Lowry can feed in a hole-in-one or Tiger can chip in from the back of the green. This time, though, it’s hoisted up on the back right of the green, and nobody can quite understand why.
And then, during the course of McIlroy’s victorious interview in Augusta National’s walnut-walled press room, he nonchalantly solves the riddle in passing.
“I think the one hole that I was not worried about but was sort of in the back of my mind was 16 because that was an unusual Sunday pin on 16, probably for the 50th anniversary of Jack holing that in ’75.”
At which point I wanted to scream, No wonder you found this thing so damn hard to win!
How can anyone so exquisitely attuned to golf history not make a burden of their opportunity for entrance to golf’s most hallowed hall of all? We all think we know what winning the Grand Slam would mean, but Rory McIlroy knew what it actually meant.
If he didn’t, chances are he would have won the 2025 Masters without needing that play-off. He wouldn’t have made a pair of double-bogeys on his final round, and he probably wouldn’t have made the Thursday pair, either. In fact, he’d have probably won at least a couple of green jackets before this year, too. Sunday in 2011 might have been a day of prodigious glory, and not the day of original sin.
But if he had won it more easily and earlier in his career, then we wouldn’t really have cared about it. It certainly wouldn’t stand out in our collective memories as such a visceral, exhausting experience. It is because it meant so much to him that he found it so difficult.
There is no glory in the struggle: the glory is the struggle.
And the struggle comes from caring too much.
If we are to invest our time and emotions into anything, the sportsperson involved must be first to do so; they have to underwrite our investment.
And this is the achievement of Rory McIlroy in the 2025: he faithfully fulfilled this contract, proving that sport remains worthy of freighting with illogical meaning.
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