Sunday Independent (Ireland)

The annals of the four masters

Northern geniuses are not like other geniuses. George Best, Alex Higgins, Van Morrison and now Rory McIlroy are on the extremist wing of the genius game, somehow more crazily gifted than your average mainstream genius. Which somehow makes life even harder

- Declan Lynch

There is a photograph (left) of Rory McIlroy with Van Morrison, the two of them leaning against a fireplace in the Slieve Donard Hotel chatting amiably and looking about as relaxed as men can be when they’re having their picture taken ‘chatting amiably and looking relaxed’.

They did not just happen to run into one another in the Slieve Donard in the vicinity of the fireplace. There was a dinner for Rory’s charity — the Rory Foundation — being held in conjunctio­n with the 2015 Irish Open at Royal County Down. It was a night when the greats in various fields would be giving something back.

And out of this gathering came the photograph which will probably be viewed in 100 years’ time as a kind of a marvellous curiosity; the way we would look at some picture from early in the last century of a musical giant such as Stravinsky with the heavyweigh­t boxing champion Jack Dempsey.

You wouldn’t normally put these guys together in your head, but incongruou­s though their meeting might be, there is something that unites them, too. They have been to the top of mountain, as it were; they have had that weird sensation of being among the best in the world at what they do; maybe among the best there’s ever been.

So while the music man might not connect completely with sport, and vice versa, in some other way these guys know one another; they know the score. But looking at that photograph now is a different experience to the one they will be having in 100 years’ time, in at least one respect — we still don’t know how it has all turned out for Rory.

Though he has achieved much, still he is expected to achieve a lot more, and by that we don’t mean he is expected to win a load of regular tournament­s on the PGA Tour — we mean the majors.

Van the Man, by contrast, is on the other side of all that. He has won the proverbial 18 majors, he has reached that high and holy place in which we find those exceptiona­l souls who have been given a prodigious talent and who have delivered on it, who have ‘left nothing out there’, as they say.

Indeed, in 100 years’ time, there will probably be a clearer realisatio­n than there is now that Morrison, all things considered, is perhaps the greatest artist of any kind to come from this island.

But Rory... will he be seen as the greatest of all the sportsmen? Certainly, there’s a chance of that, but there is also the chance that he may not even be seen as the greatest golfer; that these three seasons without a major will become four seasons or five; that his victories will not quite be on the Morrison scale — more like those of George Best or Alex Higgins, who enjoyed their days of glory, who could leave us in awe of their brilliance. But who left a few out there too.

Perverse though it can seem, for some time the talk about this extraordin­arily lucky man has been of his misfortune­s, his problems — an injury problem; a putting problem; a caddy problem; a tendency to play himself out of tournament­s with a few ridiculous­ly bad holes; the rise of rivals, like Jordan Spieth, who just seem to be more crazily driven.

Problems and distractio­ns — even the fact that he got married this year, has been cited as a ‘distractio­n’ by those who know virtually nothing about the man, but who have been holding forth with some authority on his relationsh­ips with women since it all went wrong with Caroline Wozniacki; and even back to the days of Holly Sweeney, his first ‘public’ girlfriend, from whom he parted, as millions of other couples have parted, but with the small difference that he is Rory McIlroy, who is expected to ‘explain’ these things.

Winning some more

Perhaps because he has no obvious devotion to the more traditiona­l recreation­s of drinking or gambling, the golf-club bores have naturally gone for the theory that Rory has been too concerned with matters of the heart than with the heart of the matter — which is winning, and winning, and then winning some more.

And yet, if you leave out the fact that Rory McIlroy can hire Stevie Wonder as his wedding band, it is hard to see anything going on there except plain ordinarine­ss.

He got married at 28; he nearly got married to someone else a few years ago: if any of these ‘distractio­ns’ are affecting his game, then most of the great golfers who have ever played the game, have been distracted.

No, the only thing that we know for certain is that when he tees it up these days, those numbers on the card, those unforgivin­g numbers, are in general not what they used to be. Though he can still shoot the lights out and win a tournament out of nowhere, still we recall the rebuke of his now departed caddy, JP Fitzgerald, at this year’s British Open: “You’re Rory McIlroy, what the fuck are you doing?”

You could call it the Annals of the Four Masters, these reflection­s on the four great Northern geniuses who are not like other geniuses. George Best and Alex Higgins and Van Morrison and now Rory McIlroy are on the extremist wing of the genius game, somehow more crazily gifted than your average mainstream genius, causing us to question if there is such a thing as too much talent for any mortal being to handle.

Best and Higgins couldn’t handle it, of course. They were born with an ability to do things no other human being could do, yet they would become widely known for doing things that anyone could do — anyone could drink, anyone could chuck it in if they weren’t feeling up to it.

And anyone could draw a certain comfort from this, because it brought those guys down to the level of anyone

— it suggested that ultimately even the gifted ones will settle for being drunk and disorderly.

Yet even to get to the heights from which they fell, Best and Higgins had to travel a long way. It was said of John Giles, for example, that he was quite unusual in being a child prodigy who actually went on to fulfil all that potential. So Best and Higgins were not wasters, as such, they had to be seriously dedicated to their art to make it as far as they did. But being possessed of that extra ounce of the Northern genius, they were expected to make it all the way, and they didn’t. Best was finished at 25; Higgins was self-destructiv­e on a surrealist scale.

As to where this extra ounce of genius comes from, we can only guess that it might have something to do with an instinct for escape, due to growing up in an atmosphere of conflict — though of the Four Masters, at least three of them seemed perfectly capable of starting their own conflicts, regardless of the atmosphere.

What we do know, is that if Rory McIlroy wasn’t a genius, everything would be absolutely wonderful. At the age of 28, he has already won four majors, and many other prestigiou­s tournament­s, whereas Padraig Harrington didn’t win the first of his three majors until he was 35.

But nobody has a problem with that, because Harrington is not a genius — at least not in the classical sense of the person whose gifts are so obviously sublime, tremendous things are expected of them all the time.

Then again, I would argue that Harrington is some sort of a genius, albeit one who is coming to the genius game from the opposite end of it to McIlroy — gifted, not in the extravagan­t nature of his talent, but in the way he has used a relatively ordinary range of skills to achieve the most astonishin­g things.

We would all, in our dreams, like to possess the genius of a McIlroy, but life is probably a lot easier if you have the Harrington variety. For the rest of his days, Harrington will be admired — no, revered — as the man who took what he was given and who brought this fierce moral energy to the struggle; this tremendous desire to raise himself somehow to his own high and holy place along with the gods of his game.

McIlroy, it seems, was born and raised in that place. He seems to have started with so many natural advantages that he is admired in a different way, and judged in a

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