What HAS gone wrong with Rory?
10 years on from the meltdown that cost him the Masters, McIlroy’s game is in a mess and the Grand Slam is still elusive
THE abiding image of Rory McIlroy at the Masters remains clear in the mind’s eye, even though it was 10 years ago now. He’s on the 13th hole, and the full horror of the fate that has befallen him has just dawned on another of those bewitching Sunday afternoons around Amen Corner, where the line between beauty and cruelty is always so finely drawn.
Aged just 21, he had started the final round with a four-stroke lead, and the media back home prepared their feel-good features for Monday morning of the mop-haired tyro from Holywood now cast as the boy wonder of UK sport.
Two-and-a-half hours of unforeseen drama was all it took for those pieces to be cast away, or completely rewritten. On the 13th hole, McIlroy was slumped over his driver, as another tee shot rattled among the Georgia pines. He knew the game was up. When he got to the 18th, the patrons rose as one — the dreaded sympathy vote rather than validation for the green jacket he craved. He signed for a card of 80 painful strokes.
‘I know I will get plenty more chances,’ he said. Who among us back then doubted he would return and win, and particularly after he bounced back so valiantly to claim the US Open two months later?
Fast-forward a decade, however, and the barely comprehensible fact is that McIlroy has yet to come so close again to winning the coveted prize. Yes, his Masters record looks eminently respectable in print. In his last eight appearances, he has mustered six top-10 finishes.
BUT sift beneath the bald figures and an uncomfortable truth emerges. Not one of those top-10 finishes came when he was right in the thick of it over that nerve-bound stretch when the quest for the title really begins: the back nine on Sunday.
Instead, the evidence presents a stark picture of a player struggling to cope when the pressure points come. In 2012, he was just one shot off the halfway lead, only to shoot 77, 76 at the weekend.
In 2018, he shot a brilliant thirdround 65 to get into the final group with Patrick Reed, and spoke bullishly of putting pressure on the American.
The next day, it was McIlroy who was a nervous wreck, an opening tee shot way off line foretelling the story of another brutal Sunday experience at Augusta. It was the only time in the last eight
Masters where the
Northern Irishman has shot over par in the final round. The good rounds have come when he’s been playing catch-up.
Only back in November, McIlroy finished tied fifth after concluding with three rounds in the 60s, but all the damage had been done on Thursday, opening with a fatal 75.
Similarly, in 2015, he shot 68, 66 at the weekend to finish fourth. That was the year when everything changed for McIlroy, and the pressure gauge moved up several notches. His victory at the 2014 Open meant that he was now only the Masters away from becoming just the sixth golfer to win the career Grand Slam, and only the second after Tiger Woods in 2000 to win it since 1966.
Given he was just 25, and the elusive Masters was on the one course he’d return to every year, it seemed only a matter of time. But there is a reason why Arnold Palmer never completed the Slam. Why Tom Watson never managed it, nor Lee Trevino or Sam Snead.
FORMER world No 1 Luke Donald admits that retirement has crossed his mind. After failing with his last chance of making it to the Masters this week when missing his ninth successive cut, this time at the Texas Open, he said: ‘Sure it (retirement) has crossed my mind in moments when I’m down on myself. But I’m encouraged with my game and it doesn’t feel that far away.’
And it only gets harder as the years tick by. Indeed, it seems to have had a paralysing effect on McIlroy’s performances in the other majors. After winning four in the space of as many years, McIlroy hasn’t won any since the career Slam moved into view. It’s as if the bitter disappointment of walking away from Augusta each April without the jacket lingers into the summer.
The walls are closing in, for history has shown there are precious few who go seven years or more between winning majors. Woods went 11 years between winning his 14th and 15th in 2019, but majors are generally claimed in clusters, when a player briefly feels an aura of invincibility.
THIS will be a different Masters for McIlroy in one regard. For perhaps the first time since he made his debut in 2009, nobody will be tipping him to win. Over the past month or so, his game has been such a confusing mess, he’s turned to a new coach, Pete Cowen, albeit one he’s known a long time. It’s like the wheel has turned full circle, and we’re back to the little boy lost on the 13th tee at Augusta. ‘It’s a very difficult game at times, and I feel like it is testing me a lot more than it has in the last few years,’ he said last week.
Will he ever get to replace that abiding image from a decade ago with one of the winner from the previous year slipping McIlroy’s arms into the green jacket?
Sadly, with each passing year, it becomes more likely his fate will align with Greg Norman and Ernie Els, golfers who appeared to the Masters born but who never got to walk in the Champions locker room. Players like Watson, Trevino and Palmer, and their vain quest for the one major that would always remain forever out of reach.