AUGUSTA, Ga. – The 89th Masters was just a few minutes old when golf’s most tantalizing tease was reminded, yet again, not of what he’s accomplished in this game but all that he has not.
A green jacket.
The career Grand Slam.
Hell, after 11 sometimes tortuous years, a major of any kind.
But at about 8 a.m. Thursday, there they were in the interview room, the honorary starters at the Masters, three mononym legends, Jack and Gary and Tom, all tabbing Rory McIlroy to win the year’s first major and end the longest-running soap opera in the game.
Tom Watson spoke of a “gut feeling.” Gary Player declared that now, after countless heartbreak, the time was simply right. Jack Nicklaus was just as bullish, revealing that McIlroy recently told him his strategy, shot-by-shot, and the six-time Masters champion didn’t utter a single word until the end: “I wouldn’t change a thing.”
Countless others have pegged McIlroy, 35, for green-jacket greatness, too. Tiger Woods, Nick Faldo, Phil Mickelson. Now, even his contemporaries like Shane Lowry and Tommy Fleetwood were joining in: It’s just a matter of time. A competitive certainty.
“That’s a hard load to carry – it really is,” McIlroy said. “These are idols of mine, and it’s very flattering that they believe in my abilities. But it doesn’t help, you know?”
Because, well, what if he couldn’t?
What if after all these years, all these attempts, all these disappointments, he didn’t?
This final round of the Masters was billed as a rematch with Bryson DeChambeau, but, no, that wasn’t right at all.
This was Rory McIlroy versus himself – and all that was on the line was immortality.
Rory McIlroy collected his 29th career PGA Tour win at the Masters Tournament. Here’s all of his Tour titles.
There was a note waiting in McIlroy’s locker on Sunday morning from Angel Cabrera.
The 2009 Masters champion had left him a message, wishing him good luck ahead of the most consequential major round in nearly a quarter century, and McIlroy smiled at the irony.
It was Cabrera, after all, who was paired alongside McIlroy back in 2011, during what was then his first real chance to win the Masters. Just 21 with curly locks, a pudgy physique and prodigious power, McIlroy signaled his bad intentions by opening with a record-setting 65 and seizing a four-shot lead through 54 holes. Asked that Saturday night how he expected to feel on the first tee the next day, he shrugged: “I’m excited to find out.”
What McIlroy learned that day was that he wasn’t ready. Not yet, anyway. He came unglued on the second nine, hitting an embarrassingly poor tee shot on the 10th hole that clanged off the pine trees and wound up near the cabins just off the tee box. It’s an image that now lives in Masters infamy, McIlroy standing between the cabins, hands on his hips, confused and overwhelmed, his caddie up ahead assessing the few options they had before a triple bogey sent the round into a tailspin. McIlroy wound up with an 80 and a teary exit.
“I didn’t understand why I got myself in a great position in 2011,” McIlroy said, “and I probably didn’t understand why I let it slip away.”
He has those answers now, answers that can only come after time and experience and self-reflection, answers that can only come after equal amounts of success and scar tissue. It requires body changes, swing changes, mental changes. It requires the help of his trainer, who has trimmed that extra heft to sculpt a powerful, fast, twitchy body that optimizes his slight frame and rarely breaks down. It requires the help of his longtime swing coach Michael Bannon, who has overhauled McIlroy’s inside-out swing that produced towering draws to create a more repeatable, efficient action that better covers the ball at impact, allowing him to alter trajectory, tighten his dispersion and take some of the pressure off his greatest weapon. And it requires the help of renowned sports psychologist Dr. Bob Rotella, who has unlocked certain mechanisms to defuse the pressurized situations in McIlroy’s singular journey.
“There isn’t a great player that hasn’t had meaningful and hurtful losses,” said putting coach Brad Faxon, who has worked with McIlroy since 2018. “But you have a choice: You can get worse, or you can get better. And there’s no way Rory is going to try to get worse.”
This latest iteration was on display Sunday, as McIlroy charged down the hill on 10 after slinging a tight draw around the corner. Wearing a skin-tight polo, downing a protein shake and flipping through the psychological mantras in the back of his yardage book, McIlroy didn’t even think about glancing to his left, to the cabins, to the mistakes from a decade ago that created a nearly impossible burden.
Faxon phoned McIlroy early Sunday morning to check in and laughed as he heard a little girl’s voice in the background. McIlroy’s 4-year-old daughter, Poppy, was gleefully whacking putts around the house. Apparently, all she could think about was finishing this off, too.
It’d already been a memorable week for the youngest McIlroy, who authored a heartwarming performance in Wednesday’s Par 3 Contest when she bumped a putt down the steep slope and into the cup for an unlikely birdie, eliciting a raucous reaction not just from the patrons but also her famous father and his famous friends, too.
Now, before the final round of the Masters, Faxon wanted McIlroy to tap into that same attitude: “Go out there and putt like a kid again.”
If there’s anything that has cost McIlroy in the majors over the past few years, even if just optically, it has been his performance on the greens. He two-putted every green during a flat final round at St. Andrews in 2022. He couldn’t sink an important putt on the back nine at Los Angeles Country Club in 2023. And last year, just five holes from victory, he whiffed a 2-footer on the 16th and missed a slippery 5-footer on the last to hand the title to his nemesis, DeChambeau. Faxon was on the call for NBC that latter day, and he said describing for the world, during a slow-motion breakdown, why his prized pupil missed that shocking shortie was one of the most difficult moments of his golf career.
So on this stage, with these stakes, “putt like a kid” – with freedom and purpose, without tension and consequence – was easier said than done.
“The hardest part about being an intelligent golfer,” Faxon said, “is that you know everything about what’s been done in the past. Rory knows everything, and he knows what this means to the history of the game, and how much it would mean to golf worldwide. I just can’t imagine what it was like starting this round off.”
Not surprisingly, it’d already been a fitful morning.
Ahead of the much-anticipated final-round pairing with DeChambeau, McIlroy had hoped to wall himself off from the outside noise, surround himself with family and stay in his “cocoon.” He had hoped to tuck away his phone for 24 hours, dive into the third season of “Bridgerton” and maybe watch a movie with Poppy before heading to the course.
“But I was unbelievably nervous,” he said.
McIlroy, in dramatic fashion, earned his first green jacket and became the sixth man in history to win all four of the modern majors.
And why not?
The drama was impossibly high, Sunday’s final round the most pressure-packed day in the sport since Tiger Woods was 18 holes away from completing the Tiger Slam in April 2001. This would either be the best or worst day of McIlroy’s career. It was that binary: He’d either become an instant legend, a player for the ages, an icon who proved to be historically resilient … or he’d falter again, needing to wait another 12 months to avenge what would undoubtedly be one of the most crushing losses in major championship history. Each of the previous three players who were in this position – 54-hole leader, on the precipice of the final leg of the Slam – had gone on to win. Those historical greats proved up to the task.
Little wonder McIlroy awoke on Sunday with no appetite, a knot in his stomach and legs that felt like jelly.
“My battle today,” he said, “was with myself.”
And, oh, what a compelling battle:
- McIlroy’s lead was gone by the time he stepped off the first green;
- He was five shots ahead after making birdies at Nos. 9 and 10;
- He was trailing again after an inexplicable double bogey on the par-5 13th – his fourth double of the week – and a sloppy bogey on 14;
- He was alone in first, 470 yards from victory, after a bold shot around the trees on 15 and a short birdie on 17;
- And then he dropped into a playoff with Justin Rose after McIlroy, from the middle of the 18th fairway, flared a gap wedge into the greenside bunker and missed low on a 5-footer that would have earned him the victory.
There were moments of triumph and tragedy, heroic shots and head-scratchers, the entire enigmatic McIlroy experience distilled into four dizzying hours.
Even he struggled to comprehend what was unfolding.
“There were points I thought, Have I let this slip again?”
The reaction on the final green was a cathartic release.
When he poured in the 4-footer on the first extra hole to win this unforgettable Masters, just as Jack and Gary and Tom had predicted, McIlroy tossed his putter behind him and then buckled at the knees, the weight of his accomplishment and his burden driving him into the ground and down onto all fours. There, he cried the tears of a tortured talent who was liberating 14 years of pent-up emotion. Not just sadness and frustration and disappointment. But hope and joy and satisfaction, too. When he finally rose to his knees, he reared his head back and screamed to the heavens.
“This means everything to him – it’s all he thinks about, all he talks about,” said Lowry, one of McIlroy’s closest friends. “He might not have wanted to say that, but it’s genuinely been everything for him over the last 10 years.”
With a gallery formed 10 deep on either side of him and chanting his name, McIlroy strode toward the scoring building, tears streaming down his face and his hands clasped behind his head. He was bear-hugged by Lowry, then mobbed by a gaggle of close friends who were waiting in the nearby media pen.
After a few moments, McIlroy pulled away from the group and ran his fingers through his salt-and-pepper hair.
“I’ve gotta go get a green jacket!”
His friends roared.
That was presented to him on the practice putting green, as McIlroy slipped into the 38-regular jacket he dreamed about wearing ever since he began watching the Masters with his father on their TV in their modest family home in Holywood, Northern Ireland. He was 7 when he watched Woods’ historic romp in 1997. Now, McIlroy is part of the most exclusive club in golf with him.
“My dreams,” McIlroy said, “have been made today.”
During his speech, he broke down only once, briefly, when shouting out his team and family. How they’ve been on this journey with him. How he couldn’t have done it without them. How, he told his daughter, he hopes to serve as enduring proof to never give up even after countless failures.
“They know the burden I’ve carried to try and try and try again,” he said.
And it was erased, finally, in his record 11th attempt – all of the tension and expectation and unfulfilled promise.
At the end of an Masters unlike any other, McIlroy settled into his seat in the interview room.
“I’d like to start this press conference with a question myself,” he said.
“What are we all going to talk about next year?”
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