Rory McIlroy can talk boring, no doubt he could make you an anagram of it, find a rhyme for it, and give you a couple of pretty good definitions of it too. But hard as he tries, the one thing he can’t do is play that way. “Good golf at Augusta feels like boring golf,” he said the week before the tournament, before promising, again, that he was going to try and play it that way this year. His approach lasted all of one hole, which he covered in par after missing a putt from 10 feet, and failed him as soon as he reached the 2nd tee, where he blazed a ferocious drive 340 yards into the trees beyond the dogleg.
McIlroy’s ball fetched up closer to the 4th green than the 2nd fairway, and he had to thread his second shot back through a little sliver of a gap under the branches of a dogwood and the bough of a loblolly pine. It fetched up on the far left of the fairway. Then he hit his third over the back of the green, and took three putts to get in. One of the secrets to playing Augusta National is picking up shots on the par-5s, McIlroy had just dropped one on the first he had come to this week.
