TEE TIME AT ROYAL BIRKDALE
With no clear favourite, struggling Rory McIlroy likes his odds,
Former No. 1 still looking for first title in injury-marred start-and-stop golf season
SOUTHPORT, ENGLAND— Just three years ago, Rory McIlroy was the best player in the world without a trace of argument. He won the final two majors of the year, with a World Golf Championship title in between. He had reason to believe his reign would last as long as he wanted it to.
Now he’s simply trying to get back into the conversation.
The starkest reminder of the state of his game was not so much missing three cuts in his last four tournaments. It was being told on the eve of the British Open that the bookies listed him at 20-1 to win at Royal Birkdale.
“Good time to back me,” McIlroy said. “I mean, look, if I was a betting company and I saw my form over the past few weeks, yeah, that’s probably a fair enough price. But again, all it takes is one week for those odds to go back.”
He has been through these mini-slumps more than once in the 10 years since he first played the British Open at Carnoustie. McIlroy missed four of five cuts in and ended the summer by winning the PGA Championship.
This one has been the most aggravating because it involves injury. The hairline rib fracture he suffered in January during the South African Open forced him to sit out nearly two months, and then he played only once in two months between the Masters and the U.S. Open.
It all led to what McIlroy describes as a start-and-stop year, one that to this point doesn’t include a trophy.
“I’ve had little periods like this before in my career, and I’ve been able to bounce back from them,” he said. “I’d say I was in worse positions than this.” As for his odds? That speaks to a broader picture of the 146th edition of the British Open, which starts Thursday at Royal Birkdale. Dustin Johnson, the No.1 player in the world, and Jordan Spieth have taken turns as the favourite by the bookies. Behind them is Jon Rahm, the 22-year-old from Spain who has won twice this year. Masters champion Sergio Garcia is up there.
There is no clear favourite, and there there is no clear plot. McIlroy wouldn’t have seen his storyline coming at the end of last year when he won the FedEx Cup.
“But these things sort of crop up out of nowhere and they challenge us,” he said. When he won the British Open down the coast at Royal Liverpool in 2014, McIlroy mentioned an adage he first heard from Tom Weiskopf. When a player is going well, he can’t imagine what it was like to play poorly.
And when he’s playing badly, he can’t imagine what it was like to play great.
McIlroy has slipped so far from the dominant force in golf — he hasn’t been at No.1 since September 2015 — that he could win the next two majors and still probably not reach Johnson at the top of the ranking. So where is his game now? “I feel like I can hit the ball in the fairway, and from there I can hit the ball on the green,” McIlroy said. “And if I get my line, I can put the ball in the hole from there. So it’s not bad. It’s not as if I can’t see myself shooting a good score. It’s all there. It’s just a matter of putting it all together.”