MAJOR DROUGHT NO LONGER A MINOR WORRY FOR MERCURIAL McILROY
Holywood ace insists he’s not feeling any pressure but it’s nearly six years since his last win on biggest stage
THE numbers are frightening in their brilliance. Worldwide starts, 307. Cuts made, 255 (83 per cent). Top 10s, 153 (50 per cent). Career earnings, $76 million. Wins, 26. Majors, 4. By any measure, Rory McIlroy has had a Hall of Fame career already, and while he has only just reached the halfway mark, it’s a sign of the high standards that he’s set himself that he’s left many wondering why he has gone almost six years without adding to his tally in the Grand Slam events.
The mercurial Co Down man will bid to end that quest for an elusive fifth Major win in this week’s PGA Championship at TPC Harding Park in San Francisco, where he brilliantly won the 2015 WGC Cadillac Match Play.
And while he still has another decade or more of his career remaining, his performances in the game’s biggest events in recent years suggest that he has yet to find a way of answering the question he appeared to know by rote just a few years ago,
He needs only the green jacket awarded to the winner of the Masters to become just the sixth man to complete the career Grand Slam.
Endured
And yet when one looks at the Major frustrations he has endured since he captured The Open and the PGA Championship in that magical summer of 2014, he gives the impression of a man playing with the weight of the world on his shoulders, as we saw at Royal Portrush last July.
Surprisingly, McIlroy denies that it bothers him, telling the ‘Guardian’ yesterday that his failure to get that fifth Major win is not something that he considers “an irritation”.
“I think if I hadn’t won a Major then it would be an irritation,” he said. “It’s not as if I don’t know that I can do it. I’ve done it before. Maybe the challenges are a little different, maybe the people I have to go up against are different, but being able to do it and doing it so emphatically with the first couple I won . . . it is in there.
“It’s not as if I don’t have the capability, especially coming off a season like the last one; PGA Tour player of the year, won four times, beat some of the best fields in golf. It’s not an irritation but of course you want to win the biggest events.”
Since his fourth Major win in the
2014 PGA Championship at Valhalla, he has now played in 19 Majors without success – 21 if you include this year’s cancelled Open and the 2015 edition at St Andrews that he missed after injuring his ankle playing football.
Yes, there are just four Majors a year and a career total of eight, nine or 10 is achieved over the course of 20 years or more. But McIlroy’s haul of 10 top-10s and five missed cuts over the past few years is a strange mixed bag.
Several of those top-10 finishes have been of the back-door variety and it wasn’t lost on some that even when the R&A staged The Open for The Ages last month, piecing together archive footage to create a TV Open that was won by Jack Nicklaus, McIlroy
backed into sixth place with a final-round 63.
Even Nicklaus had to wait 19 Majors between his 17th win in the 1980 PGA and that epic final victory in the 1986 Masters. In fact, other greats have faced equally lengthy fallow periods.
Tiger Woods walked in the wilderness for 11 years before he captured last year’s Masters, ending a run of 28 consecutive ‘failures’ in the big ones.
Lee Trevino had to wait 10 years (and 33 disappointments) to capture his sixth and final Major at the 1984 PGA Championship. And it was also a decade-long wait for Ernie Els before he captured Major number four with a little help from Adam Scott in the 2012 Open.
McIlroy is just one Major shy of matching Seve Ballesteros with five, two adrift of Nick Faldo and three behind the most prolific European of them all in Harry Vardon. But even when he beat Brooks Koepka in last year’s Tour Championship to claim the FedEx Cup, he sounded over-defensive of his failure in the Majors when there was debate over which of the two deserved the Player of the Year honour.
“We play 25 tournaments a year, it’s not as if the other 21 don’t count,” he lamented. “There is a perpetual cycle of Majors, Majors, Majors. We need to be careful. If we keep prolonging the Major narrative, it’s not good for our game.”
McIlroy played better than Koepka all year in everything but the Majors and it’s clear which of the two has the more gung-ho attitude.
Asked by ‘Golfweek’ about his goals just last week, Koepka was unequivocal.
“Double digits in the Majors is definitely one of them,” said the Floridian, who will be going for his third successive PGA Championship and his fifth Major win this week.
“I think that’s very attainable. I don’t focus on the other wins. You’ll always remember how many Majors Jack Nicklaus or Arnold Palmer or Tom Watson or Gary Player won, but I don’t think you could tell me how many PGA Tour events they won.”
Given his below-par performances since returning from lockdown – he’s fallen from third for strokes gained with his approach play before the Covid-19 hiatus to 74th last week and dropped from No 1 to No 3 in the world rankings – McIlroy will need to dig deep for inspiration, which is something he’s found a challenge in the sterile, post-lockdown PGA Tour bubble.
Chances
After all, he was a wire-to-wire winner in the US Open in 2011 and the 2014 Open, led into the final round in the PGA Championship in 2012 and headed the field for the last 36 holes in that 2014 PGA Championship in Kentucky.
Since then, he has yet to lead a Major championship outright at the end of any round and managed to move into the top 10 with a round to go just four times.
In 2018, he had two great chances but shot 74 in the final round of the Masters to allow Patrick Reed to claim the jacket, then came up two shots shy in The Open at Carnoustie.
“I hope I am not going to win just one more, I am going to win a few more,” he told the BBC just a week before the Covid-19 lockdown. “It’s been long enough, five-and-a-half years since I won a Major
“It seems a long time ago and a lot has happened since but I know how to do it, I’ve done it before and I know how to get it done.”
Fond memories of his 2015 WGC Cadillac Match Play win at Harding Park can only be a good thing for him.
Not only does he love the course, he’s been asked questions in Majors before and come up with answers.
“Even since those Major-winning years or days, I have beaten the best fields in golf,” he said. “I’ve won two FedEx Cups since then, I’ve won a Players Championship, I’ve won this tournament at Bay Hill.
“I’ve done a lot of great things in golf, so it’s just a matter of doing it on the right weeks.”