Rory will have a caddy at Augusta, but he knows that he’ll be on his own
MORE than ever before, it looks as though Rory McIlroy is out shopping and adding to his wardrobe, all alone. And there’s fat chance of anyone helping or advising him as he eyes up a green jacket to add to the red cardigan he brought home after winning the Arnold Palmer Invitational a couple of weeks back.
At Augusta National next week, where he finds himself for the tenth time in his young life, ‘the help’ was once legendary.
There was Stovepipe, Cemetery, Burnt Biscuits, Iron Man, Skillet and Skinny, and even a man with the name of Marble Eye. All of them African-American, all of them in the caddies’ hut, their collective knowledge of what lay outside of that little room unsurpassed.
McIlroy will have his best friend, and the best man at his wedding last year, on his bag this time around. Himself and Harry Diamond have been a pair since each was no taller than a golf bag.
Having Diamond around the place is good for him. However, whether Harry Diamond is any good as a bagman is questionable, and there’s no doubt whatsoever that his learning curve as full-time help for his buddy, having served him seven times at the tail-end of 2017, has barely commenced its difficult path.
Diamond is a scratch golfer, same as his predecessor, JP Fitzgerald, though the Dubliner was more competitive and sharp enough on the greens to once defeat one of his future bosses, Darren Clarke, in a semi-final of the Irish Close championship. Before McIlroy, Fitzgerald learned his trade walking and talking with Ernie Els, and also Paul McGinley and Clarke.
Diamond, on the other hand, before taking up McIlroy’s offer of joining him full-time — after Rory had been ‘inundated’ but unmoved by formal and informal offers from some of the most experienced caddies on both US and European tours — managed a string of food joints owned by his family in and around Belfast.
After nine attempts and only missing the cut once, McIlroy begins the next week standing at six under in his overall quest to conquer Augusta National.
Except, this time, when Augusta stiffens its shoulders and invites McIlroy’s very best shot, Rory will definitely be all alone. And he knows that.
But you also get the impression he wants it that way.
ALONGSIDE McIlroy, on 34 occasions in competitive rounds, Fitzgerald studied all that Augusta had to offer, though on so many other days he also busily filled all of his little yardage books with every little and big observation.
Augusta, nevertheless, remained a puzzle to Fitzgerald, as it does to everyone else. And when Diamond
walks into the caddies’ hut this week he will quickly enough observe a board with drawings of every single green — and a large dot alerting him, wearing his white jumpsuit for the first time, where Rae’s Creek sits in relation to each green.
In his yardage book he will see dozens and dozens of arrows drawn on the putting surfaces, indicating which direction the green breaks towards the creek.
The creek, named after the land’s owner John Rae, who popped his clogs in 1798, is the lowest point of the course as it protectively wraps its arms and legs around the 11th, 12th and 13th greens, but Diamond will also know that.
He will know that the elevation change on the course, an interesting 175 feet, reaches down from its highest point (the back right of the green on the first hole) to the creek. All of which amounts to movement of putts that has hopelessly befuddled much sturdier hands than Diamond.
What Diamond knows and how he can handle that knowledge and impart it at the correct time will be a maddeningly tricky piece of work.
‘You can’t spend enough time on those greens,’ Ben Crenshaw observed after a whole life of battling Augusta, and winning twice. ‘There is always something to learn about those greens.’
Crenshaw won his first Masters in 1984 and had to wait 11 years for his second, but each time he had Carl Jackson, the oldest caddie in the hut, on his bag. Jackson walked the three miles from his home to get his first bag in Augusta when he was 13 years-old. Three years ago he and Crenshaw finished working the course together for the 35th and last time.
‘They all have a certain pull to them… or a hot spot,’ Jackson would confess when asked about Augusta’s greens, ‘finding that spot, now that’s a thing.’
His first time at Augusta in 2009, McIlroy wanted to get there early and soak up his drive down Magnolia Lane. ‘I think it’s important to get to know the course a little bit, so that when I get there on Monday I don’t get lost,’ he explained to
Sports Illustrated, the week the magazine’s cover heralded his arrival.
‘I don’t know where the locker room is,’ he continued. ‘I don’t know where to sign in. I don’t know where the players’ lounge is. It’s just an opportunity to know where everything is and to make it easier for myself.’
Rory had so much more to discover about Augusta, and so much time to locate its true stress points.
ON the final Sunday of his first Masters, in which he tied for 20th, Rory was 19 years, 11 months and eight days old. When he won his first Green Jacket in 1997, Tiger Woods was 21 years, three months and 14 days old.
Tiger had tamed the course on his third visit.
In his tenth time of asking, McIlroy is joint favourite for the tournament with Woods (right), though such a reckoning is either sentimentality running amok or mischievous cunning on the part of the planet’s bookmakers. A sneaky mixture of the two, probably. However, McIlroy is lurking. He has four top 10 finishes at Augusta in the last four years. He’s cool, he’s calm about his game these last three months and he has also been defiant in addressing the conundrum that is Augusta’s taunting greens. When he stated that ‘you don’t need to putt great’ to win a Masters, McIlroy was not being disrespectful. It’s a plain truth held by most of the men setting out next Thursday, though coming from our man, who finished a lowly 140th on strokes gained putting on the PGA tour in 2017, it did smack of churlishness to some. Maybe those doubtful Thomases were forgetting that this is Rory McIlroy speaking, one of the game’s very few geniuses from tee to green. Or Rory ‘F ****** ’ McIlroy, as JP Fitzgerald reminded him shortly before they parted ways, in a passionate attempt to awaken his employer to the breadth and depth of a craft he had mastered long before adulthood. Alone all of this week, McIlroy must not forget. Such forgetfulness will only lead him astray. But if he remembers who he is every single day, and hears JP’s voice in his ear when trouble brews and begins to spill over on the course, as it surely will, then Rory can actually complete his career Grand Slam. It will be Rory all alone, and a little trace of JP’s voice this week… and Harry for heavy lifting. That can be a winning combination.
McIlroy is joint favourite with Tiger Woods