Rory McIlroy wasn’t happy. He was 17. He’d just won the Mullingar Scratch Cup, making him perhaps the best amateur golfer in the world. And then on the drive home he broke into tears. These weren’t tears of joy; he wasn’t worried about future pressure. He cried because he felt empty inside. He thought he’d find some kind of enlightenment with that big trophy; instead, he just found more space within his own head. He’d grown tired and frustrated with the game. He told his parents he wanted to quit.
He didn’t feel the way he thought he would feel. He wondered whether maybe he should be meeting girls, hanging out with friends, getting drunk. Teen stuff.
And Rory’s parents weren’t determined to change his mind, even after all the sacrifices they had made to get him there. (Rory’s father, Gerry, tended bar at the local golf club and held a second job as a cleaner; his mother, Rosie, worked the night shift at a 3M plant outside Belfast.) They just wanted their son to be happy. If he wanted to quit, that was fine. He had been a child prodigy, swinging a golf club on television for an adoring and hopeful crowd, not because he was raised to be a killer, but because he just liked chipping golf balls into the family washing machine.
Donald Miralle/Sports Illustrated
After four days, though, teenage Rory McIlroy got bored and picked his clubs back up. He loved golf again, whatever that meant. He won the European Amateur Championship three weeks later. A year after that he turned pro, and two more years after that he was threatening at majors, finishing third at the 2009 and ’10 PGA Championships, and at the ’10 Open.
At the Masters the next year, McIlroy shot a blazing 65 in the first round, and entering that Sunday he was four shots clear of the field. It was the largest margin held by a leader heading into the final round in over a decade. Drool practically dripped from the television screen as the CBS broadcast teed up the conclusion. The camera lingered lustily over Rory on the practice putting green while a graphic pointed out the obvious:
Only 21-year-old to win the Masters: Tiger Woods—1997.
Rory McIlroy currently 21 years old.
You don’t say.
It will be decades before anything promising in the golf world is not refracted through the prism of Tiger Woods. Since 2009 or so, no new face has been able to make a mark on the game without becoming a candidate for successor. Collin Morikawa is The Next Tiger. Before that, Jordan Speith was The Next Tiger. The first Next Tiger, though—or the first serious one, at least—was McIlroy. It was a story too tempting, too lucrative, too warm and fuzzy not to tell.
Rory is not a big man; he’s listed at 5'9". But when he has the big stick in his hands there is a whiff of the supernatural in the air. The great inverted catapult has made him one of the longest players on tour for the entirety of his career. That week more than a decade ago at Augusta, he led the field in driving distance heading into Sunday, just as Tiger did when he was young and fearless. Ask most 30-something tour pros whose swing they most wish they could have, and they’ll tell you: Tiger circa 2000. For a younger generation, the answer is often: Rory.
McIlroy has never really been an electric putter like Woods, but there is a poetry to his game—something that, when he has been on, makes you believe that he could get out of any jam. Speith and Phil Mickelson make the game look hard 99% of the time. Rory and Tiger, at their best, made it look like the idea of something going wrong hadn’t even occurred to them.
In 2011, when Rory won the U.S. Open, it wasn’t by 15 shots—as Tiger had, stunningly, 11 years earlier—but he did leave the field to spin out in his jet wash, eight strokes back. That week at Congressional Country Club, Padraig Harrington pointed to the 22-year-old and said to Sports Illustrated: “If you are going to talk about someone challenging Jack’s record [of 18 major championships], there’s your man.” One year later, McIlroy repeated the feat, finishing the PGA Championship at Kiawah eight strokes clear of the field. In ’14 he won the Open Championship at Hoylake (the previous winner there? Tiger, ’06) and the PGA Championship at Valhalla (Tiger, ’00, obviously).
As McIlroy strode up the fairway in Louisville that year, playing into Mickelson and Rickie Fowler, eyes ablaze, shining in the literal dark and stormy night, it all seemed so obvious. In Shane Ryan’s wonderful account of the 2014 season on tour, Slaying the Tiger, he wrote of Rory: “We knew the truth again—this virtuosity comes once in a generation, at best, and though we force the empty comparison on each new prodigy, you cannot fake the flush of recognition … that brings the name ‘Tiger’ to the tip of every tongue.”
But deep down, we knew then—and certainly we know now—that Rory McIlroy was no Tiger Woods. Ultimately, at that Masters in 2011, he did not do the chyron writer any favors, and he certainly didn’t step on the throats of his competitors. He looked like a kid who wanted it too badly. Overwhelmed by the moment, he shot an 80, finishing tied for 15th.
It has been eight years since McIlroy last won a major. Eleven years after his collapse, he still has not won the Masters, where on Thursday he shot a middling 73, making some long putts and shoving some short ones, finishing six strokes back of the leader, Sungjae Im. It can often feel as if the golf media pays him too much attention, pretending that the Rory we see today is the Rory of 2014. And, in a way, that’s understandable. At 32, he’s in his golfing prime; he’s never had any significant injury problems; and he’s ranked No. 9 in the world. He hasn’t gone through any meaningful slumps, like the one that saw Speith plummet to No. 92 or the one that dropped Fowler out of the top 100 and may keep him there the rest of his life. When an athlete at such an early age bares his teeth and makes his opponents bleed, and then nothing dramatically changes his story, it’s hard to ever again think of him as anything but a contender. And still, for all the contending, Rory has whiffed at 26 majors in a row.
I’ve been thinking about Rory a lot lately. About his place within an old and strange and rigid game amid a rather volatile time in its history. About our attempts to take the Jordanesque model that Tiger refined and square it with the trajectory of The Next Tiger’s real-life career. And about McIlroy’s attempts to square that story with the realities of his own career. The golf world talks about Rory as a contender too much. But perhaps he’s more interesting in this post-alpha-dog phase of his career than he ever was while winning majors.
McIlroy has defied most of the easy explanations that our best athletes face when they struggle. Is he too old now? No. Is he just incapable of winning the big one? No. Has an injury robbed him of something? No. Does he just stink? No. On paper, he should contend at every tournament he plays in—but then you watch him fly greens with a wedge and miss the cut at the damn Texas Open, and you wonder how he’s even managed to hold onto that top-10 ranking. Something, obviously, is missing.
That carnivorous flow state is gone. At the U.S. Open last year, McIlroy approached Torrey Pines’ back nine in a four-way tie for the lead. He scrambled at the 10th to make a par save. Over the next two holes he’d find himself in all the wrong places and drop three shots, effectively ending his tournament. At the Masters, he was most recently in serious contention in 2018, when he was in the final group on Sunday, three strokes behind Patrick Reed. But he never really made a run, wilting to fifth with a 74.
Even at smaller events, in pole position late on Sundays, he has imploded. Leading with five holes to go at the European Tour’s year-end event in December, he dropped three shots, letting five golfers zip by, including the winner, Morikawa. After the tournament, in a much-memed moment, he was photographed back at the clubhouse, having ripped his shirt in rage. In January, at a European Tour event in Dubai, he led again, this time with three holes to play. His driver started spraying, he found himself in the desert, in the bushes, in the water. He would drop to third as another young gun, Viktor Hovland, grabbed the trophy. Frankly, it’s all been hard to watch.
Robert Beck/Sports Illustrated
“When I try to soften the blow of not playing my best golf or not getting a win, it’s like: I’m already winning. I’ve got this great life, and I’ve got this wonderful family, and I’ve made all this money,” McIlroy said in December on the No Laying Up podcast. “I started to use all that as a crutch, and I had to realize that that’s my life and that’s wonderful, but you can’t separate these two things.”
That interview was littered with longings and hopes. Like: “It’s easier to get to the destination than it is to stay there.” And: “People don’t remember good finishes.” And: “I’ve had chances, I just haven’t capitalized on them.” And: “I still feel like I have a long runway ahead of me.”
To Rory’s credit, he’s never backed away from hard questions about, well, anything, really. He’s known to be generous with his time, openly confronting everything from geopolitics to the ins and outs of his game. But how many answers does he have about himself?
“The thing that I would love to know about Rory McIlroy,” ESPN writer Wright Thompson wondered aloud recently on The Golfer’s Journal Podcast, is “I’m curious [if] what he saw happen to his friend Tiger Woods”—meaning Tiger’s post-sex-scandal downfall and his subsequent struggles with injuries and substances—“how did that scare [Rory]? I think he knows something about living in public that very few people know.”
The most interesting thing about McIlroy right now is the extent to which he isn’t Tiger. Despite all the similarities—the big drives and the early successes and the working-class childhood—he’s ended up in the one place Tiger never was: competitive purgatory. Rory can feel like a bit of an afterthought these days, no matter how much any broadcaster might try to sell him to us. Even if he’s rising up the leaderboard, nobody is quaking anymore. But Tiger—post-scandal, with a bad back, with a bad leg, after a layoff, whatever—has rarely just felt like some random member of the field. He’s never missed a cut at Augusta as a pro. Rory missed it last year.
And for all of the iciness Tiger has always shown the media, he was never coy about his need to win that 19th major. Even through his scandals and his early injury problems, Woods insisted that he wouldn’t show up if he didn’t think he could win. It wasn’t until 2017 that he ever admitted to doubting himself. Of course, whatever doubt he did have, understandably, after all the back and knee surgeries, was clearly put aside quickly. In two years he went from wondering whether he would ever tee it up again to winning the Masters. About a year ago he was asking doctors whether his leg might need to be amputated. Now, he believes he can win this weekend.
Meanwhile, McIlroy’s absolute un-Tiger-ness—his comfort in openly questioning himself; his willingness to discuss things off the course—is what makes him interesting. He will talk about nearly anything. He has openly reprimanded everybody from Phil Mickelson (for his working with the investment arm of the Saudi Arabian government to squash the PGA Tour) to Donald Trump (for his handling of the pandemic). Thompson, on that podcast, posited that such honesty might be a way for McIlroy to avoid the depths to which one can fall when sports are everything and then the bottom falls out. But perhaps such willingness to zoom out and talk about how golf just isn’t that important has cost him something competitively, as well.
Robert Beck/Sports Illustrated
In recent years we have learned the hard way to be careful when describing public figures as thoughtful or cerebral. But McIlroy does offer something refreshing: earnestness. He doesn’t have all the answers, but he does seem dedicated to turning the questions over while we watch him. Among con men and walking dial tones, he seems like a person trying to figure things out. Most of the golfers who move the needle these days are heels, or at least antiheroes. McIlroy is a face.
But no matter how much he talks openly about his life off the turf, or about his attempts to find something extra on the course, it seems clear that he has not yet found peace. He is caught between the comforts of his stardom and the unease that comes with knowing he is underachieving. He has tried to convince himself, and us, that he is O.K. with his golf life, and it clearly hasn’t worked for either party. Hence, the shirt ripping. How much does McIlroy’s willingness to engage with the complexities of the world—to divert his gaze from the tunnel of competition—cost him the absolute, delusional confidence that an athlete needs to succeed on a generational level?
In his 1992 review of Tracy Austin’s memoir, Beyond Center Court, (forgive me) David Foster Wallace, underwhelmed by the bland book, offered a theory about blue-chip athletes and the overused sayings they spout: “How, at the critical moment, can they invoke for themselves a cliché as trite as ‘One ball at a time’ or ‘Gotta concentrate here,’ and mean it, and then do it? Maybe it’s because, for top athletes, clichés present themselves not as trite but simply as true, or perhaps not even as declarative expressions with qualities like depth or triteness or falsehood or truth but as simple imperatives that are either useful or not and, if useful, to be invoked and obeyed and that’s all there is to it.”
It’s nearly impossible to believe that McIlroy has reduced the stimuli at Augusta to such a useful binary. Nearly every year at the Masters he starts slowly. He’s shot in the 60s on a Thursday just twice. Coming into this tournament, he'd been trending in the wrong direction, opening with a 73 in 2019, a 75 in ’20, and a dreadful 76 last year. After that last one, he said: “I'm just at the start of a journey here that I know will get me back to where I want to be.”
Sure.
Those aren’t the scores of somebody who knows he’s on the right path. Those scores are demons.
I find it admirable when professional athletes admit they care about more than winning. Last year, Kevin Kisner, one of the tour’s shorter hitters, said that he didn’t believe he could win a tournament at a course like Torrey Pines or Bethpage Black, major venues defined by their length and narrow fairways. An interviewer asked him why, then, he bothered showing up. “Because they give away a lot of money for 20th,” he said.
But the calculus for someone like Kisner, a very good player, is not the same as it is for a generational prodigy. I want to believe Rory, that golf just isn’t that important to him. How admirable and aspirational it is to see, say, Ash Barty conquer the tennis world, and then go home forever to relax? How freeing might it be for all of us to see somebody let go of their own story, comfortable knowing that they need to answer to only themselves and their loved ones?
I wish I could believe this is what Rory is doing now. But even watching him give those measured, honest responses in that wonderful lilt of his feels like seeing him squirm.
At this point, the story of Rory McIlroy’s career is the story of him telling himself stories.
Recently, some of these stories have been technical. He went through a slump in parts of 2020 and ’21 after telling himself that he needed to chase Bryson DeChambeau’s distance off the tee. The speed training threw his tempo out of whack. Now he’s taking the opposite tack: He says he has committed to hitting more irons and fairway woods off the tee, throttling back to prioritize accuracy, like Tiger did at Hoylake in ’06.
Some of these stories are emotional. I have a family that I care about more than I could ever care about golf. … I’m an investor now. … I’m wearing many hats within the game. Some of them are speculative, logistical. I’m not thinking about golf, I’m just learning to juggle. … I’m going to skip the WGC Match Play so it doesn’t mess with my stroke-play game.
Kohjiro Kinno/Sports Illustrated
D.J. Piehowski put it this way on a recent episode of No Laying Up: “He seems like he’s feeling a lot of things out there.” And feelings probably aren’t the best things to be fighting with in high-pressure situations.
What does he really want to know? What is he trying to talk himself into? Is the story of Rory McIlroy that it’s O.K. not to win at all costs, that losing is freedom? Or that once you’ve lost your edge, you can never get it back?
ESPN writer Kevin Van Valkenburg, on The Shotgun Start podcast, reflected on a strange stretch in 2003 when Mickelson seemed determined to pitch in a professional baseball game. Mickelson had insisted, against all logic, that throwing a baseball was effective cross-training for golf, and he believed that if he could increase his velocity just a little bit that he could at least pitch an inning in the minors. The Toledo Mud Hens, a Triple A team looking for some good publicity, were fine giving him a chance.
In truth, Mickelson’s fastball failed to touch 70 mph, and Mud Hens coaches, surely fearing that they might cause the death of the world’s second-most-famous golfer, barely even let position players take cuts off of him at practice. They, obviously, could not in good conscience let him anywhere near actual competition. This was the weirdest—but certainly not the only—strange stunt that Mickelson has pulled during the course of his career. So, why’d he do it?
“Phil did this for a long time because he needed to tell himself a story that allowed him to not be a failure for never having won a major,” Van Valkenburg said. “Similarly, Rory is [saying to himself]: The reason I haven’t won the Masters is because I just haven’t told myself the right story.”
Rory McIlroy isn’t the most focused storyteller in sports. He says too much about too many things. And maybe that means he thinks about his struggles too much to put them behind him. Or maybe the weight is ready to be lifted from his shoulders, if the right narrative could just set his head straight.
Can Rory win the Masters this year? Perhaps that’s the wrong question. Instead, maybe we should ask: What story is he telling himself?
