Augusta, Ga. – Another major season is there, and that means it is time for another round of “is This The year of Rory McILroy? The best player in the world in the past decade and a half, McILroy is now in 11th year of a drought of majors, with a litany of frustration and sorrow in his wake.
All this gave him a degree of serenity, a level of calm and perspective as he approaches his 72nd major that he did not have at his first. McILroy led Magnolia Lane for the first time in 2009.
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“I was just happy to drive Magnolia Lane,” he recalls Tuesday. “We didn't think it was going to be good for me or badly for me. It was just an absolute shiver of a whole life to lead this path to what he was, 19 years old, and to play in my first masters. ”
During this tournament, he finished T20. Two years and four top 10 later, he would be held at the 10th tee with the heads of the masters … and that's where the story of Rory McILroy really started. A collapse in Augusta, a trophy got up two months later at the US Open, and the roller coaster was extinguished. When McILroy won three times more over the next three years, he seemed to go to Tiger-Esque Heights … But since then, nothing.
At the start of the victory without victory, the more McILroy pushed, the more he fought. And speaking on Tuesday, he seemed to have understood why. “At some point in someone's life, someone doesn't want to fall in love because he doesn't want to break his heart,” he said. “People, I think, instinctively as human beings, we sometimes hold back because of the fear of injuring themselves, whether it is a conscious decision or a subconscious decision, and I think I was doing it a little on the golf course for a few years.”
Rory McILroy takes another race for Masters. (AP photo / George Walker IV)
(Associated Press)
But that is part of the necessary growth and change, whether in golf or in life. “Once you have crossed this, once you have crossed these sorrows, as I call them, or disappointments, you arrive in a place where you remember what it is and you wake up the next day and you are, yes, life continues, it's not as bad as I thought,” he said. “In recent years, I have had the chance to win some of the biggest golf tournaments in the world, and that has not been quite happened. But life continues. You dust yourself and start again.”
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For McILroy, the Pivot Point arrived at the end of the 2019 season, when he flouted at his end by missing the cup at the open championship of Royal Portrush, where he had been considered the favorite. “I had had a great year. I had won four times in the world. I had won the Fedexcup. I had my best statistical season. But I did not have an excellent season in the major championships,” he said. And after years to treat majors as “just another week”, he changed his approach. “I got involved in some way in somehow affected a little more and to give myself a little more in these weeks.”
Numerically, the results were almost the same, but the results of the end of the day were clearly different. Beginning with the Masters 2022, McILroy has eight top-10 in 12 majors, including four top-three.
The fact is that behind each of these is a story:
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The 2022 Masters, where Scottie Scheffler stunned the terrain and the McILroy Sterling's final round was practically unnoticed;
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The 2022 open, where Cam Smith pulled a victory to St. Andrews;
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US Open 2023, where Wyndham Clark had the tournament of his life at the Country Club to remember the best load of McILroy;
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And, of course, US 2024 US Open, where McILroy missed two short putts from Pinehurst and Bryson Dechambeau simply overcome it.
Which brings us to this year, and yet another attempt to master. McILroy said he was not trying anything new this year, just trying to stay on the point and rhythm, in the same way as every week.
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“Once we enter the tournament week as now, you try to treat it in the same way,” he said. “I want to do certain things and I want to do my exercises on the green and make sure I do my range sessions just so that I checked the boxes and that I feel as comfortable as I can go out on Thursday morning.”
On Thursday, he will have another chance in a major championship. And if recent history is an indication on Sunday, it will always have this chance. What will he do with it then?
