Mcilroy in tears
Ulsterman just misses the Open cut despite sensational round of 65
After being accused of “choking” by an American TV pundit, Rory Mcilroy coughed up a round of entertaining defiance as he tried to cling on to his place in this Open Championship.
Mcilroy often recovers his poise when the bird has already flown and his Friday round drew roars from a crowd who assumed he was heading home for a long look in the mirror. It was never the plan for Mcilroy to end up needing local sympathy, but he entranced his audience with five birdies on the back nine to finish with a 65 – two-over par after 36 holes – to no avail. He is out.
On the Golf Channel’s Live From..., the pundit Brandel Chamblee had said: “This is nothing new what we saw out of Rory Mcilroy [in Thursday’s woeful round]. He has had – historically – a bad run of first rounds. When someone plays poor golf in the beginning of a tournament and then great golf the rest of the way, then it’s not something physical. It’s not something technical.
“On paper coming in here, demonstrably, Rory Mcilroy was the best player.
“I know what the world rankings say. But when someone
consistently performs under expectations, the word is choking. We shy away from it. But now it’s five years [since he won a major]. And there was a reason why people shied away from picking him this week. And it was because everybody felt like the moment was going to be too big for him. You don’t like to be correct in these presumptions, but it played out exactly that way.”
If this damning verdict was shared by many here, it failed to dent Mcilroy’s mood as he set out at 3.10pm on mission impossible. In grey and black against a monochrome sky, and with his umbrella raised against the drizzle, the pre-tournament 8-1 favourite strode down the first fairway with sharp shouts of encouragement from the gallery. He laughed and joked with his caddie as he marched.
On Thursday, Mcilroy hit his opening shot of the championship out of bounds on the way to a quadruple bogey and finished with double and triple bogeys at 16 and 18 respectively for a calamitous eight-over-par 79. This time he was determined to be not overwhelmed but positive. Whistling past the graveyard is a common defence mechanism in sport, but Mcilroy radiated the air of a man under less pressure than the day before, perhaps because the cause already felt lost.
As the soft rain ceased for a while on the second green, Mcilroy stood with his putter under his arm staring at the blazing orange leaderboard showing a host of names who were over the horizon and far away. At that point the Republic of Ireland’s Shane Lowry led on 10-under par. Beyond lay the damp stage where Mcilroy destroyed the course record at 16-years-old with a round of 61.
Those days of precocity and innocence were a distant memory to a household name who, frankly, had been humiliated by Thursday’s round and was now being punished for it. A long battle to make the cut is a top player’s vision of hell. Missing it offers a swift exit, a chance to regroup.
Scraping into the weekend condemns him to a weekend probably on the margins of the action.
Mcilroy may lack consistency and first-day nerve, but he is not without pride. Though he missed birdie chances at four, five and six, he posted birdies at three, seven, 10, 11, 12, 14 and 16. The first of those brought a burst of laughter and drew his eyes to the uncaring sky. Early in the back nine, Mcilroy found a hot streak. From holes 10 to 16 he was irresistible.
His youthful, outrageous 61 round here turns out to have been a burden: a stunner by which his 2019 Open performance was bound to be judged. The “native son” as Chamblee’s station called him, had said: “My confidence is more fragile than it was back then.” But can lack of “confidence” explain Mcilroy’s pattern of folding under the weight of expectation in majors and then scrambling back up the leaderboard in search of respectability?
The sages see common denominators to do with his choice of caddie (best friend Harry Diamond), his commercial preoccupations, his supposed disinclination to listen to expert advice. Four major titles, 25 wins and 95 weeks at world No1 is a nice haul, but far short of where a player with his talent should be. His career has descended into one long round of increasingly tedious preview questions: can he break his duck in the Masters, can he end his five-year wait for a major title?
An Open at Royal Portrush was never a gimme, even with all that local knowledge, yet Mcilroy has
A long battle to make the cut is a top player’s vision of hell. Missing it offers a swift exit
strayed into an area nobody thought he would at 30 years of age; a place where his magnetism is diminishing. In his fightback under leaden skies you saw flashes of the gift that made him a prodigy on the lush courses of Northern Ireland. But he makes it such hard work.