BURIED IN THE jubilant European press conference after their Ryder Cup win was a throwaway but instructive line.
With questions to Rory McIlroy having dominated the press conference, a journalist finally directed a question to Jon Rahm. Shane Lowry cracked that it had been a Donald and McIlroy press conference, with McIlroy conveying his amazement by saying Rahm was “only the best player in the world.”
With that, McIlroy showed why he is suited to team golf. In what other week of the year could one of the world’s best players bestow that title upon one of his rivals?
Rahm said Europe’s cohesion rested on the agreement that everyone would leave their reputations and achievements at the gate, and McIlroy’s essential generosity of spirit was crucial in making sure that happened. It’s hard to imagine any of America’s highest-ranked players lavishing any team-mate with a compliment that is zero-sum by definition.
Plus, the Ryder Cup is a patently absurd construction that only works if everyone involved buys earnestly into it. McIlroy’s commitment to it is honest and unwavering and for as long as players as talented as McIlroy take the Ryder Cup as seriously as he does, the competition’s status is secure.
But this is a reciprocal arrangement, as team golf suits McIlroy too. Imagine how freeing it must be to arrive at a tournament and be able to praise someone else as the best player in the world? In a team format, McIlroy can merely be one great player among other great players and still be rewarded for it. But in the unsparing world of individual stroke-play, that kind of admission is tantamount to a concession.
This is what Wyndham Clark was trying to communicate before the Ryder Cup, when he said he wanted the opportunity to beat McIlroy in Sunday’s singles. Those comments were twisted into headlines of Clark: I’m Better Than Rory’ but in truth Clark was just saying every golfer’s quiet part out loud. As he later clarified: “If I don’t think I’m better than every player out here, then what am I doing? If I’m trying to be the best player in the world, which is what I’m trying to be, I’ve got to believe that.”
Everybody needs to persuade themselves they are the best, or at least that nobody else is better. McIlroy’s audacious talent means he has needed less convincing on this front than anybody else. Every week, 99.9% of professional golfers have to tell themselves they are good enough to win. McIlroy is among the 0.01% who are told the same message by everybody else.
If there has been a seam of weakness through his game in recent years, it’s not a lack of determination or ability to grind through moments of low confidence, as is often thrown his way. No, it’s his reckoning with too great an expectation; the failure to meet a perhaps unfair level of demand to succeed at the majors.
How else to explain his blowing his tee shot out of bounds and taking a quadruple-bogey on the first hole at the 2019 Open in Portrush? Or his infernal struggles at the Masters? Many of his struggles at Augusta have come from indifferent opening-days: he hasn’t shot better than 72 on a Masters Thursday since 2018. “Those first rounds are not because he loses his game or he prepares badly”, Paul McGinley told me earlier this year. “It is because he is nervous and because of the weight of expectation on his shoulders. The best way of getting rid of expectation is by shooting a high score. I know: I made a career of doing it.”
One of Luke Donald’s greatest tricks in Rome was to allow McIlroy be nothing more than a great golfer. He didn’t heap additional pressure on him by pairing him with a rookie, instead playing him with Tommy Fleetwood and Matt Fitzpatrick, reliable members of the supporting cast. McIlroy didn’t lead Europe out in the singles either, instead placed fourth to guarantee a point on which he delivered.
“You know that you can play loose”, said McIlroy of his partnership with Fleetwood. “You can’t play tight. You don’t feel like you need to be perfect because you know you’ve got a partner beside you that’s going to bail you out if you need to.”
McIlroy will now return with everybody else to the relative mundanity of individual stroke-play, trying to play his way through this enduring paradox.
He is at his best when he is playing something greater than himself, but by dint of chosen field is forced to spend the vast bulk of his career trying to win the prizes that would mark a fair return on his etherial talent, in competitions where somebody else cannot be the best player in the world.