Beware the power of a contented competitor!

HERE’S the funny thing about weddings – no matter how grand the venue, how glittering the guest list, how lavish the menu or how stellar the entertainment, at heart, they’re all the same.

You might be hosting hundreds of famous friends in a castle with Stevie Wonder as your wedding singer, but you’ll be feeling no different to the couple who can only stretch to a small family dinner in a local carvery and a first dance to an iPod playlist – fancier trappings don’t make for fancier dreams or fewer butterflies.

And at every wedding, no matter how flash or how frugal, there’s always a moment that reminds everyone of the simplicity and enormity of their purpose – till death do us part, how much greater a promise can anyone make?

When he walks up the aisle this afternoon, Rory McIlroy will be an only child, golf’s wunderkind, the teenage prodigy who made good his early potential, the young pretender to the sport’s highest honours.

But when he walks back down, he’ll be a married man, a grown-up, no longer burdened by the expectations of precocity but facing, instead, a whole new set of responsibilities: A husband, a provider, a family man, a father. No longer the lone son of devoted parents, the indulged young star whose interests always came first, now somebody else’s other half with somebody else’s welfare to put before his own.

So, will he play a different game, now that he’s a different man? Rory’s emotions have always impacted hugely his performance, most memorably precipitating that heartbreaking meltdown on the Masters’ back nine in 2011.

He was just 21, barely out of his teens, and the whole world was watching as he buried his face in the crook of his arm while his hopes unravelled.

Right then, the Masters was the only thing in the whole world that mattered to Rory McIlroy – what happened next, though, shows that a bit of perspective, a fresh set of priorities, can work wonders for his game.

Shortly after his crisis in Atlanta, and just a week before that year’s US Open, Rory went to Haiti as a Unicef ambassador to witness, at first-hand, the aftermath of the previous year’s earthquake. The term ‘devastating’ had been used about his Masters experience – in Haiti, he saw what the word really meant. The trip, he said, gave him a ‘huge sense of how fortunate I am’, and of how insignificant green jackets and famous trophies are when you’ve lost your home and your family in an instant. ‘I hit a little white ball around a field sometimes’, he tweeted later, and once he’d put his sport in perspective, his demons got smaller, too.

He won that US Open in style, becoming its youngest winner since 1923 and beating Tiger Woods to set a new record for the tournament.

He has had a turbulent few years, both off the golf course and on it, making headlines when he called off his wedding to Caroline Wozniacki after the invites had been sent out, then prompting a huge backlash for playing a round of golf with Donald Trump.

For all the experienced advisers that surround him, he makes his own decisions and the judgment he relies most heavily upon is his own.

Deciding to call off his wedding must have been difficult, but it was a brave move and one he clearly never regretted. Deciding to accept President Trump’s invitation to play golf, on the other hand, was probably an easy, spur-of-the-moment response but it is, he has said, something he wouldn’t repeat.

Up to now, his closest counsel has been older, wiser heads – from now on, the first person he’ll turn to will be his wife. Unlike the rest of his entourage, her priority won’t be his golf game, his professional advancement, his public image – it will be his happiness, his contentment, his peace of mind.

That Haiti experience suggests a young man, privileged and pampered and enriched beyond imaginings, who has been searching for some deeper meaning in his life.

When Rory walks down the aisle a married man today, there’s good reason to hope he will have found it. And the danger for his rivals is this: once he stops worrying about winning, like after Haiti in 2011, he’s unbeatable.