Rory McIlroy signs autographs for fans during during a practice round on Tuesday ahead of the 153rd Open Championship at Royal Portrush, Northern Ireland.Paul Childs/Reuters
The last time he was in a tournament at Royal Portrush, Rory McIlroy was keen to downplay expectations.
People wanted to make that outing – the 2019 British Open – a homecoming story. McIlroy had pooched another Masters earlier in the year, but looked better in the following two majors. Could winning on the course he grew up on fill up the hole in his career?
McIlroy rejected the idea – “I’m not here defending anything.”
Which is another way of saying you are.
On the first hole, McIlroy aimed for the bay rather than the pin. He quadruple-bogeyed the hole, shot eight over for the day and that was that.
British Open a homecoming and chance at redemption for McIlroy
For a good while, it looked like that might become McIlroy’s defining performance. He was 30 years old and becoming his generation’s Greg Norman – someone who overdelivered early, and spent the rest of his career underpromising.
That all went out the window this past April when McIlroy won the Masters.
Upon arrival in Northern Ireland this week, about to play in the same tournament, there is a palpable change in him. Less jittery. More direct eye contact. McIlroy’s ticked the majors off his to-do list, and so that’s that. His career’s figured out.
Rory McIlroy completed a career grand slam earlier this year by winning the Masters at Augusta, adding the green jacket to the British and U.S. Opens, and the PGA Championship that he'd already won.Mike Blake/Reuters
He could win a few more, but he’s not going to be Tiger Woods or Jack Nicklaus. He’s too well known to become a sensation now. He is comfortably in the Gary Player, Phil Mickelson bracket. His name will ring out, but it won’t give you chills.
The done thing in sports is to talk about how there’s always more to do. At Augusta, McIlroy spoke of finding his “next Everest.”
But nobody cares about the second time you climb Everest, and McIlroy’s climbed it.
Maybe this wouldn’t have been enough at 25, but at 36? Having suspected for many years that this would end in great wealth and bitter regret? It must feel like you’ve dug your way out of the professional grave.
Of course, you can’t expect the guy to say it. This sort of perspective is too nuanced for sports.
Someone tried here, putting to McIlroy that the pressure is off.
McIlroy jumped into the middle of the question: “Is it? Is the pressure off?”
Which is another way of saying it is.
Rory McIlroy with his coach Michael Bannon during a practice round at Royal Portrush on Tuesday.Andrew Redington/Getty Images
Golf has one thing that sets it apart – it’s forever. As long as he can pick up a club, a once great golfer is still considered great, even if he’s not.
Big tournaments are filled with old goats who should have stopped years ago, but won’t forego the privilege of exemptions they gained by winning. Sometimes, they have to be functionally dismissed before they will go away. Why? Because by that point, they know what it means to play. Not win. Not even compete. Just play.
Everybody thinks it must be unrelenting joy to be a pro athlete, but I wonder.
It’s great when you’re young, but not in any comparative way. For as long as you can remember, you’ve been the best. You can’t appreciate how special this is because you’ve never known anything different. Then you get injured or your hands start to go, and it’s over.
Even if nothing goes wrong, you’re cresting the hill at 30. By 35, you’re struggling to hang on. No time for appreciation then. You’re too busy kicking at the guys on the ladder below you.
If you make it to 40, you’re unusual enough that people write stories about your age, but in a sad sort of way.
Coincidentally, that’s the beginning of the moment when you are able to appreciate how good you have it. Or had it.
Now you get to live the next 40 years with neither the ability you once had, nor the income source, nor the luxury of being able to disappear. You are famous for having been famous, which can be its own special hell.
Rory McIlroy works on his putting on the seventh hole as his putting coach Brad Faxon looks on during a practice round at Royal Portrush on Tuesday. The 153rd Open Championship begins on Thursday.Maja Smiejkowska/Reuters
World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler was in the same postal code as this idea here this week when he said, “This is not a fulfilling life.”
Scheffler seemed to mean it in the sense of the impermanence of success. That’s a lot of philosophy for a golfer, but ask him again once he’s blown five years’ worth of majors. I’ll bet it’s a different sort of answer.
The real trick isn’t stringing together some wins. It’s creating a Goldilocks career – everything just right. Ask Woods. You think he wouldn’t give back a few majors for a different ending to the story?
McIlroy has managed that trick. It took Nicklaus five years to win all four majors. It took McIlroy 15. That’s a boatload of perspective right there.
The beats to his story are Disney perfect – a prodigious emergence; a booming start guaranteeing maximum exposure, and so maximum money; a series of humiliating failures over what seems like an endless second act; a comeback in the third that was so will-he-or-won’t-he that it seems predestined in retrospect.
John Elway finally won that Super Bowl on the fourth try, and then again on the fifth. But then he was done, all used up. He was about the same age McIlroy is now. He still walks with a hitch.
McIlroy is a fitness buff who’s rarely been seriously injured. Mickelson won a major at 50, and he’s not exactly a gym rat. Who’s to say McIlroy couldn’t play 20 more years at a high level? And he need never again feel he must do anything to justify his place in the pantheon. That history is settled. He can just go out there and do it because he likes to play, and because he still can.
There have been more successful golfers than McIlroy. But has there ever been a more successful story?