Rory McIlroy is confident he can contend at the British Open.
Confident McIlroy believes game ‘coming together’
SOUTHPORT, England — So artful are the usual gambling options in this creative nation that any reprobate can bet on some serious minutiae concerning the 146th British Open. Which golfer will finish first among Thai players, among Indian players, among Swedes, among Danes, among Scandinavians, among continental Europeans? Will there be a hole-in-one, a wire-to-wire winner, a playoff? Will the winner wear a hat?
Wait, what about Rory McIlroy at a heaping 21-1 on Betfair.com?
“Good time to back me, I think,” McIlroy said brightly. Not lacking faith
Is it? For 20-some times a payback, maybe, but given recent results, no. In the last 33 days, McIlroy has missed the cut at the U.S. Open, the Irish Open and the Scottish Open, leaving open the question of whether he’s glad there wasn’t an England Open. Just as harrowingly, on Wednesday in advance of the tournament at Royal Birkdale, McIlroy dragged out so much of the soundtrack of the lost golfer.
“I feel like it’s all coming together,” he said. Oh, no. “As I keep saying, it doesn’t feel that far away,” he said. Help! “I saw some good signs with how I putted last week in Scotland,” he said. The … pain … of … it. “I’m just waiting for that round or that moment or that week where it sort of clicks and I’ll be off and running,” he said. A chill roams the spine … And, as if to place a bow of horror upon that bouquet of woe, he also managed to wedge in a passage commonly recognized as unrelentingly dreadful:
“It is what it is.”
At certain stages of their career, golfers must practice delusion as a method of retaining sanity. It’s common in a heartless sport. Tiger Woods told of a game just turning the corner for so long earlier this decade that it seemed as if that corner might be as large as Kilimanjaro. McIlroy is in a thicket. Because he hasn’t played much (10 events in 2017) owing largely to a hairline fracture in a rib, he hasn’t had the privilege of the grind to improve. Because he hasn’t made cuts lately, he hasn’t played much (shrinking even those 10 events). He has been ineffectual enough relative to his own past that his nine majors since his dominant close to 2014 actually look better than they seem in the mind: five top-10 finishes.
“And because I haven’t played that much,” he said, “the only thing I can really do is take some sort of confidence from what I’m seeing in practice, and sometimes that doesn’t quite translate to what happens on the course.”
The four-time major winner has come to live a rare phase of life, one familiar only to people such as, say, Novak Djokovic from tennis: a patch of subgreatness that follows upon a patch of greatness so that it feels something like decline. McIlroy has done all of this by the age of 28, 10 years after he turned up as an 18-year-old low amateur at the 136th Open in Carnoustie, Scotland, and tried to explain to people his Northern Ireland home town: “I think the guy that invented the cat’s eyes on the road was from Hollywood.” Listeners swooned.
“I think everything sort of has its appeal as the first time,” he said, “whether it’s driving down Magnolia Lane (at the Masters) for the first time or playing in the Open Championship or seeing your name for the first time up on that big yellow board in the grandstands there. So that, over time, wears off a little bit, and I’d say that would be the same for anyone …
“You’re always excited (at every major). You’re excited, you’re anxious, there’s so many feelings that are going on. But, yeah, no, it’s down to business (nowadays). Back then in ‘07, I didn’t think I had a chance to win the tournament. I was just trying to soak it all in and try to learn as much as I can. Where nowadays I come to the Open Championship with the goal of taking away the Claret Jug.”
He has done all of this in an era when the top of golf is wildly fragmented with mass talent, with seven straight majors yielding first-time winners and the 2010s yielding 16 one-time major winners out of 30. It’s less digestible for casual fans than, say, Woods’s era of dominance from 1997 to 2008.
“If you look at tennis,” No. 1-ranked Dustin Johnson said, “the 50th guy in the world is probably not going to win a major championship, whereas a guy here near the top 50 has a really good shot.” No one, Johnson included, expects any mimicking of the 14 for 46 run of Woods. Dominant in 2014
For a time in late 2014, it appeared McIlroy just might do a half-impression at least, as what he did already was unreasonably good. He won the British Open and the PGA Championship that summer to make it a phenomenal four for his last 15 majors, and he won the World Golf Championship-Bridgestone Invitational tucked between all of that.
“When I won those three tournaments in ‘14,” he said, “and I was where I was in the game, yeah, of course, I thought, OK, I really can keep this going and I can become — I was going to the Masters the next year thinking I can win the Grand Slam, I can do this, I can do that …”
Golf dislikes such thinking, of course, even if it spent 12 years letting only Woods think thusly. McIlroy continued: “Some things come along that you don’t expect, whether it be an injury …”
He concluded: “But I’ve still got plenty of time to, I guess, rekindle those feelings and that sort of play.”