Rory McIlroy walked back into Augusta National this week as defending Masters champion, with wife Erica Stoll and their young daughter Poppy at his side, less than two years after he filed for divorce from Stoll and described their marriage as 'irretrievably broken.'
For starters, the reconciliation between Rory McIlroy and Stoll came after an intensely public rough patch. In May 2024, just days before the PGA Championship, court documents in Florida showed that McIlroy had initiated divorce proceedings after seven years of marriage. The timing alone guaranteed maximum attention, and it quickly became one of golf's defining off-course storylines, overshadowing his form and fuelling a wave of speculation about what had gone wrong behind closed doors.
