AUGUSTA, Ga. – The 89th Masters was just a few minutes old when golf’s most tantalizing tease was reminded, yet again, not of what he’s accomplished in this game but all that he has not.
A green jacket.
The career Grand Slam.
Hell, after 11 sometimes tortuous years, a major of any kind.
But at about 8 a.m. Thursday, there they were in the interview room, the honorary starters at the Masters, three mononym legends, Jack and Gary and Tom, all tabbing Rory McIlroy to win the year’s first major and end the longest-running soap opera in the game.
Tom Watson spoke of a “gut feeling.” Gary Player declared that now, after countless heartbreak, the time was simply right. Jack Nicklaus was just as bullish, revealing that McIlroy recently told him his strategy, shot-by-shot, and the six-time Masters champion didn’t utter a single word until the end: “I wouldn’t change a thing.”
Countless others have pegged McIlroy, 35, for green-jacket greatness, too. Tiger Woods, Nick Faldo, Phil Mickelson. Now, even his contemporaries like Shane Lowry and Tommy Fleetwood were joining in: It’s just a matter of time. A competitive certainty.
“That’s a hard load to carry – it really is,” McIlroy said. “These are idols of mine, and it’s very flattering that they believe in my abilities. But it doesn’t help, you know?”
Because, well, what if he couldn’t?
What if after all these years, all these attempts, all these disappointments, he didn’t?
This final round of the Masters was billed as a rematch with Bryson DeChambeau, but, no, that wasn’t right at all.
This was Rory McIlroy versus himself – and all that was on the line was immortality.
Rory McIlroy collected his 29th career PGA Tour win at the Masters Tournament. Here’s all of his Tour titles.
There was a note waiting in McIlroy’s locker on Sunday morning from Angel Cabrera.
The 2009 Masters champion had left him a message, wishing him good luck ahead of the most consequential major round in nearly a quarter century, and McIlroy smiled at the irony.
It was Cabrera, after all, who was paired alongside McIlroy back in 2011, during what was then his first real chance to win the Masters. Just 21 with curly locks, a pudgy physique and prodigious power, McIlroy signaled his bad intentions by opening with a record-setting 65 and seizing a four-shot lead through 54 holes. Asked that Saturday night how he expected to feel on the first tee the next day, he shrugged: “I’m excited to find out.”
What McIlroy learned that day was that he wasn’t ready. Not yet, anyway. He came unglued on the second nine, hitting an embarrassingly poor tee shot on the 10th hole that clanged off the pine trees and wound up near the cabins just off the tee box. It’s an image that now lives in Masters infamy, McIlroy standing between the cabins, hands on his hips, confused and overwhelmed, his caddie up ahead assessing the few options they had before a triple bogey sent the round into a tailspin. McIlroy wound up with an 80 and a teary exit.
“I didn’t understand why I got myself in a great position in 2011,” McIlroy said, “and I probably didn’t understand why I let it slip away.”
He has those answers now, answers that can only come after time and experience and self-reflection, answers that can only come after equal amounts of success and scar tissue. It requires body changes, swing changes, mental changes. It requires the help of his trainer, who has trimmed that extra heft to sculpt a powerful, fast, twitchy body that optimizes his slight frame and rarely breaks down. It requires the help of his longtime swing coach Michael Bannon, who has overhauled McIlroy’s inside-out swing that produced towering draws to create a more repeatable, efficient action that better covers the ball at impact, allowing him to alter trajectory, tighten his dispersion and take some of the pressure off his greatest weapon. And it requires the help of renowned sports psychologist Dr. Bob Rotella, who has unlocked certain mechanisms to defuse the pressurized situations in McIlroy’s singular journey.
“There isn’t a great player that hasn’t had meaningful and hurtful losses,” said putting coach Brad Faxon, who has worked with McIlroy since 2018. “But you have a choice: You can get worse, or you can get better. And there’s no way Rory is going to try to get worse.”
This latest iteration was on display Sunday, as McIlroy charged down the hill on 10 after slinging a tight draw around the corner. Wearing a skin-tight polo, downing a protein shake and flipping through the psychological mantras in the back of his yardage book, McIlroy didn’t even think about glancing to his left, to the cabins, to the mistakes from a decade ago that created a nearly impossible burden.
Faxon phoned McIlroy early Sunday morning to check in and laughed as he heard a little girl’s voice in the background….
