Rory McIlroy Knows What He's F***ing Doing, But He Can't Stop Won't Stop
The Rory McIlroy bandwagon is rolling again, so cue all that "career grand slam" talk in the next few weeks. A short essay on the greatest golfer of his generation.
Let’s start by addressing the “generation” mentioned above.
The Tiger generation ended in the winter of 2009. Yes, he came back for a late career encore that brought that glorious denouement at Augusta ten years later, but his generation was the generation of the 1990s and 2000s, when he strode around the world like Atlas standing atop the world and everyone else wilted in his presence.
All they had to see was that red shirt on Sunday and they’d be reaching for the smelling salts.
“That’s the thing about McIlroy: he knows he can hit that one great shot, and he can’t resist trying to hit it.”
Golf: The Next Generation started in 2010, just a few weeks after Tiger drove into the fire hydrant, and it was McIlroy who emerged, so clearly and so convincingly, as its star.
Four Majors followed in the next four years, the first two of them by eight-stroke victories, and everyone was enraptured at just what this young Northern Irishman was capable of. They were poles apart in terms of temperament, but the pupil wasn’t far off track in the master’s legacy: Tiger won five Majors before he was 25. McIlroy was 25 when he won his fourth.
And then … a decade goes by.
A decade of heartache and heartbreak.
A decade of too many complete flame-outs and countless near misses.
There was no bigger near miss than the US Open last summer, when he missed tiddlers at the 16th and 18th greens and watched Bryson DeChambeau lift the trophy by one shot.
As the Sky Sports commentator Laura Davies said then, “He won’t be able to resist trying to knock this one close.”
A few minutes later, in the same broadcast, Sir Nick Faldo said, “A lot of Majors are won by one great shot.”
And that’s the thing about McIlroy: he knows he can hit that one great shot, and he can’t resist trying to hit it.
Even when logic dictates that he should play the numbers game, should hedge his bets, should lay up safe instead of going for it from two-eighty over the water, he almost never does.
If the tournament is on the line and one great shot might win it, Rory takes aim.
This may be a big part of the reason he hasn’t added to his four Majors, but it’s also a big part of the reason so many tune in whenever he’s in contention — no matter how impressive Scottie Scheffler is, no matter how many tournaments he wins and no matter how at ease he looks while he’s doing it, he’s not now and never will be in the same league as McIlroy when it comes to box office appeal.
No player today is.
Tiger was the greatest star attraction of them all and will never be matched.
But in his generation, Rory is out on his own.
By the time he was 35 — and there were many reasons why, including frailties of body and mind — Tiger’s career had already peaked. McIlroy at 35 still looks, on his day, like the best player in the world, and since he turned 30 the big days have seen many more on-days than off-days.
And still, so many of us watch him between our fingers.
His game, so extravagant in its brilliance, almost always puts him in position.
And then his mind, so certain of its own fragility, almost always lets him down.
In 2017, the same year they parted company acrimoniously, McIlroy’s former caddie JP Fitzgerald confronted him during the opening round of the Open Championship at Royal Birkdale when — in one of the regular mid-career flame-outs that have been so much rarer over the past five years — he had slipped to five-over-par after just six holes.
Fitzgerald said to him,
“You’re Rory McIlroy, what the fuck are you doing?”
The caddie’s job didn’t last long after that, but you get the feeling his words did.
Rory McIlroy is Rory McIlroy, and the sad thing is he needs to be regularly reminded of that fact.
Lavish in his physical talents, unmatched in his work ethic, yet so often exposed by the fatal flaws that exist inside his own mind, McIlroy is the human embodiment of an old Irish refrain that says the Lord gives us everything we have, but always keeps a bit back for himself.
One thing is for sure. When Rory McIlroy is on the premises on Sundays — or Mondays, as today at the Players Championship, where he defeated JJ Spaun in a three-hole play-off — most of us will be watching to see both the genius and his flaws.
Thanks for reading.
Shane