Inside the final round of Rory McIlroy’s 2025 Masters victory (part 2)

(Editor’s note: This is the second of a three-part centerpiece about Rory McIlroy’s 2025 Masters victory. Here was the opening piece. This article originally ran as one in the first 2026 edition of Golfweek magazine.)

Brad Faxon asked what already must have been his fifth or so question as the audience at Rory McIlroy’s annual summit, an event he hosts with all his partners at Ohoopee Match Club in Georgia, munched on dessert. They wondered if the memories of coming home in 40 and blowing a four-stroke lead when he was a 21-year-old buck, a “character-building day,” as Rory McIlroy once put it, had come up at all. McIlroy shook his head and explained that the tee has been moved back and more to the left, requiring a draw.

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It was a different look for him, and he easily hit a 3 wood into the catbird’s seat rather than snap-hooking driver next to a cabin as he did 14 years before and made triple. But he let his right hand off the club through impact on his approach after hitting a little toe deep and high on the face. He looked up and thought the ball would hook left into trouble, but it soared straight at the flag, landed on the front part of the green and rolled out to 15 feet.

Birdie.

“The worst I felt on Sunday at Augusta was probably when I holed the birdie putt on 10,” McIlroy said, “because I’m like, Oh, I really can’t mess this up now. There’s that pressure. You know that you’re not just trying to win another tournament, you’re trying to become part of history, and that has a certain weight to it.”

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After birdie on No. 10, things started to slip

That good break stretched his lead to four strokes, and he maintained that margin despite a bogey at 11 and following with a rock-solid par at 12.

Six holes to go, but the fact remained that McIlroy had been stuck on four majors since the 2014 PGA Championship despite having more top-10 finishes in the majors than anyone in golf – 21 in all since 2015 and zero majors to show for it.

As a kid, he would fill out scorecards with ridiculously low rounds he imagined shooting to win majors and in the marker’s box he would sign Nick Faldo, the six-time major winner whom he idolized. McIlroy went on to star in the Faldo Series, a premier junior golf circuit the Englishman founded. Faldo served as lead analyst for Sky TV’s Masters coverage in Europe and, in his pithy style, predicted that either one great shot would win it or one poor shot would lose it for McIlroy. Faldo wasn’t wrong except for one miscalculation. “He had about six of each,” he said.

The first poor shot happened at Azalea, the par-5 13th after McIlroy chose to layup with a 7-iron. He recalled too many times over the past 17 years that he had tugged a shot into the azaleas or worse – drowned one in the watery grave that is Rae’s Creek.

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“It plays with your head a bit,” he said.

Up ahead, Justin Rose was mounting a charge, adding a birdie at 15 to trim the lead to three. When McIlroy arrived at his ball, he discovered it had settled near a drainage hollow on the left side of the fairway and he had a right-to-left hanging lie. Knowing his tendency to hit wedges left from an upslope, he aimed right of the flag.

World Golf Hall of Famer Curtis Strange had finished his analyst duties for ESPN and was driving home on I-75, listening to the broadcast on his phone. When McIlroy rinsed his third in Rae’s Creek, Strange almost drove off the road.

“Think about how fragile the mind is in a situation like that,” Strange said. “Every shot is so magnified. Maybe he was trying too hard, though I don’t know if I believe in that. But I do know we could all see there was a large weight on his shoulder.”

Dad later asked McIlroy What were you thinking?’

McIlroy’s double bogey whittled his lead to one. He told Faxon and his dinner guests that just two days earlier, he had been back to Augusta for filming of a documentary the club is making on his victory and he dropped five balls at the exact spot where he had duffed it in the water and this time planted each of them within 6 feet of the flag stick. “He still couldn’t believe that he did that bonehead move,” Faxon said.

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“My dad said to me after, ‘You had all of Georgia on your left and you hit it right,” McIlroy recounted. “He said, ‘What were you thinking?” ”

It reminded McIlroy of a similar wedge shot he hit after laying up at the 14th hole of the 2023 U.S. Open that plugged into the thick fescue bank above a greenside bunker. McIlroy blames that shot for costing him the title to Wyndham Clark. Afterwards, he said to the media, “I would go through 100 Sundays like this to get my hands on another major championship.”

What was McIlroy thinking after dunking his wedge at 13? “I thought, I’ve done it again. You idiot,” he recalled.

It only got worse as he made a bogey at 14. Up ahead, Rose made a birdie at 16 and joined Ludvig Aberg, who birdied 15 behind him, to forge a three-way tie. McIlroy’s win probability had dropped to 29.8 percent, according to Data Golf, down from 95.3 percent after his birdie at 10.

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The 89th Masters was far from settled. Aberg, the young Swedish sensation, would soon eject with a disastrous finish of his own and finish seventh. Meanwhile, McIlroy steered his drive into the left side of the fairway at Firethorn, the par-5 15th, and had overhanging pine branches interfering with his direct line of attack.

Harrington observed that playing conservatively was McIlroy’s kryptonite, but the aggressive play was right in his wheelhouse and he conjured up a daring, slinging 7-iron from 207 yards that hooked some 20 yards around limbs and pine needles and rolled 6 feet from the cup.

The third and final part of this story will run on Sunday.

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Rory McIlroy’s 2025 Masters victory (part 2): Double bogey was setback