Rory McIlroy of Northern Ireland is awarded the Green Jacket by Masters Champion Scottie Scheffler after the final round of the 2025 Masters Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club on April 13 in Augusta, Georgia.Michael Reaves/Getty Images
After blowing up at the Masters in 2011 – turning a four-shot final-round lead into a 10-shot deficit – Rory McIlroy played it cool.
“I’m very disappointed at the minute,” the Irishman told reporters, but “it was a character-building day.”
Years later, he admitted that it was the only time the sport made him weep.
That one was simple. McIlroy had golf’s greatest tournament won, and he lost it.
On Sunday, he tried something more ambitious. He had the Masters won, and he lost it, and won it again, and lost it again, and won it for real, and tried losing it again, but won it.
If you saw it, you will not forget the image of McIlroy chasing his own approach shot down the 17th fairway loudly begging it to, “GOGOGOGO.” It went. That was only about the 10th-most operatic moment of his day.
It was a bad round of golf that will go down as one of the all-time greats. To watch, if not to live.
In the end, McIlroy missed a putt to seal it on the 18th, then beat Justin Rose on the same hole in a playoff. When it ended, he dropped to the ground and broke into heaving sobs. Second time, I guess.
Rory McIlroy speaks during the Green Jacket Ceremony after the final round of the 2025 Masters Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club on April 13 in Augusta, Georgia.Michael Reaves/Getty Images
Then he cried again kissing his wife. Third time. And as he walked through the frenzied crowd that chanted his name. Fourth.
“I wanted to be the bad guy today, but still …” Rose said afterward, and you had to agree with his unspoken conclusion.
Whether you started Sunday as a McIlroy supporter or detractor or completely indifferent to the guy, nobody with a heart could have been rooting against him by the end of it. How often do you get to watch someone fumble toward their destiny and make it across the line while falling down?
So after years of chasing, McIlroy joins golf’s lead group. He is now one of six men who’ve won all four major titles. None have done it in less style, or with more drama.
Where to start with this one? How about the first hole?
McIlroy caught the bunker with his drive – a real feat, since it’s 25-yards short of his average. His next shot was even shorter. After he’d finally gotten to the green, things got worse. McIlroy started pushing the ball around the short grass like someone playing bumper pool.
Fifteen minutes in, McIlroy had double-bogeyed and surrendered the solo lead.
In the documentary to come of McIlroy’s life, this moment will land somewhere between the first and second commercial breaks. Thirty years of practice, all coming down to this instant – was McIlroy going to be an all-time great, or an all-time choke artist? Was this to be a story of resilience, or one of regret?
McIlroy chose the former, though he made it as hard as possible on himself.
There are versions of him that don’t choose to lay up on the 13th in order to avoid the water, and then put it in the water. That’s when an easy walk to the finish turned into a disorderly stumble.
There’s a McIlroy that doesn’t put it in a bunker on the 18th. That’s when you started to wonder if he’d built one of his houses on a pet cemetery.
But there’s also a version of McIlroy that doesn’t hit a curveball Sandy Koufax would have been proud of on the 15th, or lay it into the green perfectly in the playoff. For every bad shot, there was an equal and opposite brilliant one.
McIlroy set one notable record on Sunday. He is the first man to win a Masters after notching four double bogeys in the tournament. Nobody has ever achieved so much while being so mediocre.
In the end, he put on a clinic, which means demonstrating how to kill a patient as well as save one. You could see it on his face. This guy had just visited with the Ghost of Golf Future, and come out the other end a different person.
Rory McIlroy of Northern celebrates winning the 2025 Masters Tournament after the playoff hole on the 18th green.Richard Heathcote/Getty Images
The post-win interview with Jim Nantz in Butler Cabin is one of the great and tedious rituals of our culture, like meeting Oz.
Nantz is there to lay it on thick. The guy who’s just won, sunburnt and stupefied, tries to make everyone happy by breaking down. They rarely manage to fulfill the task.
This was the first time Augusta National chairman Fred Ridley did the honours, just by introducing the new champion. As soon as he started to talk, McIlroy was crying (fifth time).
“I started to wonder if it would ever be my time,” McIlroy said, dissolving. “I’m sort of wondering what we’re all going to be talking about going into next year’s Masters.”
This line came out so plaintively that when it was time for Nantz to speak, the Barbara Walters of sports broadcasting was taking big gulping breaths and having trouble getting his lines out.
That meant McIlroy had to provide his own weepy anecdotes, which he did by mentioning his mother and father and then it was the sixth time. Fewer tears have been shed at a screening of Brian’s Song attended exclusively by middle-aged men with father issues.
After watching enough sports, you know how the ecstasy goes (though the agony always surprises you). Grab your head or point to the sky or pump your fist. If you’re really ambitious, fall over. Then you hug your spouse, pick up your kid and make sure all of your sponsors’ logos are in the shot.
But every once in a while, sports will surprise you, and in the most delightful ways. Sometimes even the biggest human brands aren’t working on a script. They’re just making it up as they go, like the rest of us, and can’t control themselves.
It wasn’t the golf that made the 2025 Masters legendary. It was that. If in the space of one day, Rory McIlroy can change the whole story of his life, then maybe you can, too.