Rory McIlroy is taking another run at the Masters. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
AUGUSTA, Ga. — Another major season is here, and that means it’s time for another round of “Is this Rory McIlroy’s year?” The world’s finest player over the last decade and a half, McIlroy is now in Year 11 of a major drought, with a litany of frustration and heartbreak in his wake. McIlroy has lost a major virtually every way one can lose a major — from ahead, from behind, on Thursday morning, on Sunday evening.
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All of that has given him a degree of serenity, a level of calm and perspective as he approaches his 72nd major that he didn’t have at his first. McIlroy first drove up Magnolia Lane in 2009.
“I was just happy to be driving down Magnolia Lane,” he recalled Tuesday. “There was no thought of whether this was going to be good for me or bad for me. It was just an absolute thrill of a lifetime to drive down that lane at whatever it was, 19 years old, and be playing in my first Masters.”
At that tournament, he finished T20. Two years and four top-10s later, he would be standing at the 10th tee with the lead in the Masters … and it’s there that the Rory McIlroy story truly began. A collapse at Augusta, a trophy lifted two months later at the U.S. Open, and the rollercoaster was off. When McIlroy won three more times in the next three years, he appeared headed for Tiger-esque heights … but since then, nothing.
Early on in the winless streak, the more McIlroy pushed, the more he struggled. And speaking on Tuesday, he seemed to have figured out why. “At a certain point in someone’s life, someone doesn’t want to fall in love because they don’t want to get their heart broken,” he said. “People, I think, instinctually as human beings we hold back sometimes because of the fear of getting hurt, whether that’s a conscious decision or subconscious decision, and I think I was doing that on the golf course a little bit for a few years.”
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But it’s part of necessary growth and change, whether in golf or in life. “Once you go through that, once you go through those heartbreaks, as I call them, or disappointments, you get to a place where you remember how it feels and you wake up the next day and you’re like, yeah, life goes on, it’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be,” he said. “The last few years I’ve had chances to win some of the biggest golf tournaments in the world and it hasn’t quite happened. But life moves on. You dust yourself off and you go again.”
For McIlroy, the pivot point came at the end of the 2019 season, when he sputtered to a close by missing the cut at the Open Championship in Royal Portrush, where he’d been considered the favorite. “I’d had a great year. I’d won four times around the world. I’d won the FedExCup. I had my best statistical season ever. But I didn’t have a great season in the major championships,” he said. And after years of treating the majors as “just another week,” he changed his approach. “I made a commitment to myself to sort of earmark these a little bit more and to give a little bit more of myself in these weeks.”
Numerically, the results were roughly the same, but the late-Sunday outcomes were starkly different. Starting with the 2022 Masters, McIlroy has eight top-10 finishes in 12 majors, including four top-3 finishes.
The thing is, behind each one of those is a story:
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-The 2022 Masters, where Scottie Scheffler blew away the field and McIlroy’s sterling final round was virtually unnoticed;
-The 2022 Open, where Cam Smith sniped away a win at St. Andrews;
-The 2023 U.S. Open, where Wyndham Clark had the tournament of his life at L.A. Country Club to hold off McIlroy’s best charge;
-And, of course, the 2024 U.S. Open, where McIlroy missed two short Pinehurst putts and Bryson DeChambeau simply stepped over him.
Which brings us to this year, and yet another attempt at the Masters. McIlroy indicated he’s not trying anything significantly new this year, just trying to keep himself on point and in rhythm, the same way he does every week.
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“Once we get into the tournament week like now, you try to treat it the same,” he said. “I want to do certain things and I want to do my drills on the putting green and make sure I get my range sessions in just so that I’ve checked the boxes and feel as comfortable as I can going out there on Thursday morning.”
Come Thursday, he’ll have another chance at a major championship. And if recent history is any indication, come Sunday, he’ll still have that chance. What will he do with it then?
