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.
If McIlroy needed a reminder of exactly what the sort of slow and steady golf he was supposed to be playing looks like, he only needed to take a look over his shoulder. He had been paired with world No 1 Scottie Scheffler. He and McIlroy made for quite a pair, a regular odd couple. Xander Schauffele, who made up their threesome, hardly got a look in.
Scheffler is currently ranked in the top five on every single measure the PGA Tour keeps between tee and green. Scheffler’s only 87th in the driving distance list, but he leads the tour in strokes gained in total, and on approach, is second for strokes gained off the tee, and fifth on the list around the green. If he could just putt half as well as he does everything else, he’d win everything between now and next Christmas. He’s so consistent that his caddie has made more money on tour this year than McIlroy.
At the 2nd, while McIlroy was cavorting around in the pine straw trying to find a line, Scheffler had laid his tee shot up well short of the big fairway bunker. He rolled his second shot right up to the front of the green, chipped his third to 9ft and a birdie. It wouldn’t be right to call Scheffler boring, exactly, but the man served steak and potatoes for his champions dinner here last year. Someone asked him this week what he would be doing with his life if wasn’t a golfer and his answer was “Gosh, I don’t know”. Luckily for him, he doesn’t need to. He’s masterly with an iron, and his short game can be miraculous.
Some of the shots he hit in this round, like his splash out of the back bunker for a birdie on the 12th green, were as good as anything anyone’s seen around here in a long while. Of course McIlroy can play that way himself, it’s the bits in between he struggles with. Because while Scheffler was plugging away, par, par, par, and played all 18 without a single bogey, McIlroy was careening about the course, dropping shots here, picking them up again there. He drove the 3rd green for a birdie one minute, and dumped his tee shot into the big front bunker at the 4th for a bogey in the next.
McIlroy beat on like this, it’s the only way he knows how to play. He lashed a 350-yard drive up the long uphill 8th, where a lag putt set up a second birdie and brought him back to level par, then immediately smacked his tee shot at the 9th into a tree, where, luckily enough, it ricocheted back on to the fairway and he got up and down in par. The lucky break seemed to improve his mood, and he picked up another shot at 12, where he holed a putt from 10 feet, and another at 14, where he holed one from 15. And then he sliced his drive into the pine straw at 17, and made another bogey after his second skittered over the green.
Meanwhile, Scheffler was marching on up the leaderboard ahead of him. He made three birdies in four holes at 13, 15, and 16, which took him to six under, one off of Bryson DeChambeau’s clubhouse lead. McIlroy, who made three bogeys and four birdies, was one under, so five shots back and the week getting away from him already. Boring is as boring does. And McIlroy doesn’t.
