What Now for Rory McIlroy?
Windows are a convenient metaphor for life and sports. In the broadest sense we are living in our own window of time and while the premise of where we are on our journey presumes how open or to what degree it may be closing is forever precarious. So much of where that metaphorical window is within the prism of a sports life is largely a physical proposition because historical actuary tables have always been a reliable guidebook. The physical being the greater indicator of how much longer because there are only so many hits a running back’s body can endure, how many more trips 94 feet for the knees of an NBA star and how many more 98 mph fastballs on the black for the arm of a major league pitcher. Too often the windows close so abruptly that the aging process appears in warp speed from one training camp to the next. But what of the mind? How can the intellectual and psychological elasticity of the mind elongate or shrink the sports windows of greatness?
I proceeded to call it Rory’s Rubicon five years into his quest for the career grand slam at The Masters which was also running concurrently with his pursuit of any major title. The longer it went the wider the mental river felt, and the psychological current was only getting stronger. He entered the space of four majors by 25 years of age in 2014 and pulled up a chair to a pristine tall top with two occupants, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods. The presumption that his fifth would come fairly soon was not a cavalier position, it made sense, tons of sense. When it didn’t, he was not only distancing himself from Jack and Tiger, who went from four to five major victories in a year and a month respectively, he was methodically distancing himself from every historical player who reached at least five majors on the odometer. The average time taken to achieve the feat has been two and a half years. When he closed the book of a decade without a major victory at the site of his last, the 2014 PGA, he had also endured a flurry of gut-wrenching losses in 2022 at the Open Championship, the 2023 U.S. Open and the deepest cut, the 2024 U.S. Open at Pinehurst. As he entered 2025, he was embarking on year 11 without a major victory, the same gap of time that Tiger Woods experienced from the 2008 U.S. Open, major win number 14, and the 2019 Masters, the 15th and most certainly final major win of his mind-numbing career.
Tiger and Rory are different, in so many ways. However, the historical gap of almost the identical period of time between 14 and 15 for Tiger and 4 and 5 for Rory demands an examination. While much is not comparable the human condition is in play and that’s where we get to what now? Tiger was never someone to display or likely possess any self-consciousness on the golf course. First, what about his life in golf would have made him self-conscious? Self-assured? Check. Self-belief? Check, check. The most astonishing display of the power of his mind to refuse even a scintilla of self-consciousness was the 2010 Masters. Up until the end of the major championship season of 2009 he was throwing a perfect game of closing golf tournaments when he got himself out in front and then Y.E. Yang happened at Hazeltine in August of 2009 and his preposterous perfecto was broken up. It was going to be a historical footnote and then Thanksgiving happened, and he found himself on the back page of New York tabloids for three straight weeks. A golfer! Not Madonna, not Brittany, not Shia LaBeouf. Helicopter footage was more valuable than the yet to be relied upon pro tracer. When Tiger turned up at the 2010 Masters, he was even scolded by the chairman of Augusta National Golf Club. He finished 4th that week. 4th? Take your self-conscious dime store psychobabble and shove it. I know the category for greatest 4th place finishes in majors is not a big category, although the “No Laying Up” boys could somehow make it a four-part series and it would be compelling, and I would listen, but there’s no second or third place. Conversely, as Rory has been trying to walk through fire and broken glass to win any major, he consciously and comfortably has shared the psychological journey of self-examination, self-reflection while also clearly exhibiting with even some modest degree a level of fragility that it’s clear that self-consciousness is along for this turbulent yet rewarding pursuit.
This is where the road may fork, or maybe it won’t. Tiger’s climb to 15 in totality was much more about the physical than the mental, but it does factor. A decade of injury and surgery had compromised him to the role of spot starter, but 2018 was the big build to reentering the caldron starting with The Open Championship in July, the final round 64 to put his hot breath on the back of Brooks Koepka’s neck in August at the PGA and then win number 80 at the Tour Championship with a Bob Jones like 18th coronation at East Lake. Who was riding in the sidecar that day?Rory. He saw Tiger climb to “A” summit for the first time in years, not THE summit but one, nonetheless.
Climbing requires all athletes to get comfortable in the thinnest air and even though Tiger lived there comfortably for years it had been some time since he had completely outlasted all the others to plant his flag on the last hole. One additional footnote, right before Tiger showed up at the 2019 Masters, he clipped Rory at the now defunct match play in Austin. One more little piece of Kevlar to fortify Tiger’s mind and maybe debilitate Rory’s. Tiger’s march to major 15 was a gut-wrenching, gut check on every hole culminating with a wobbly 5 on the last to cross the tape AGAIN. He survived.
When Tiger completed the career grand slam at the Old Course in July of 2000 it was after he had already won majors by 12 and 15 shots. Nonetheless, many historians and intellectual golf observers believe his Open.
Championship win, major number four and the first of his three career grand slams was his Opus. All the way down to him calling shots with Steve Williams as he was picking out church spires in the town of St. Andrews and painting brush strokes with his fairway metals coming home on the inward nine at the Old Course. While Tiger’s completion of his first career slam was a virtuoso, Rory’s was a mash up of an episode of ‘MacGyver”, “Jackass”, “Survivor”, and ultimately the “Bourne Ultimatum”. But Rory’s fifth and his own slam possessed similar texture to Tiger’s 15th both after more than a decade without any. So, what now again?
Tiger was an old 43 in 2019, and Rory is an injury free, vibrant, sturdy and physically intact soon to be 36-year-old. But this now gets to the mind, the place Rory has done as much work as he has on his wedge play. The digs at Rory have endured whether he’s been privy to the extent of the noise about his inability to close majors over the past years or not. Here’s one thing he unequivocally is… aware. Even though he broke through his decade-long vortex to claim his green jacket, the circuitous, calamitous and dizzying way he got there has permitted a subtle uncurrent of cynicism to persist inside the golf ecosystem. Let’s extinguish that as best we can, knowing that cynics struggle to exist without cynicism pulsating through their veins. Few elite players have not voiced the unmatched pressure Rory was navigating and many believe no player has ever carried more into a final round in their lives and we could go further back but that’s sufficient enough context for now.
The Sunday duality of fatalism and heroism Rory displayed was exhausting and exhilarating. Each fragile moment was followed by an exhibition of big stinkin’ onions culminating with his second into the first playoff hole which followed Justin Rose applying ungodly heat on Rory to answer after his feeble five to finish regulation. Resilience doesn’t need a literary definition any longer in Webster’s it just needs a full-page fold-out of Rory on his knees on the 18th green after his long anguish-filled odyssey was over. Stoicism teaches that life should not be viewed as merely successes or failures but merely outcomes. The problem with that is that life is more fun only thinking about the good results. What’s fun about simulating failure? Rory has leaned on and been held upright by “the process” but even the sturdiest man would likely be crippled by the public de-boning and fileting Rory has suffered like a Dover sole most recently at Pinehurst last June.
The phrase it’s darkest before the dawn is poignant and practical and coined by Thomas Fuller in a poem in 1650. What wasn’t dark about the 1650’s? Rory reached his summit after being blown back to base camp with a kick to the teeth repeatedly. Each time, he persisted in beginning his ascent to that far off place, and in the case of Augusta National and his slam, a place no one has planted their career slam flag with all due respect to Gene Sarazen. Sarazen likely did not know he was in a playoff with Craig Wood until he finished that day in 1935 and really didn’t know what his win in the Augusta National Invitation meant until years and years later when the Masters was actually called The Masters and it was associated with the platinum quartet of golf’s greatest titles.
So, now that Rory has gone to that place where only five other men in the last 90 years speak the same language is he susceptible to what the human condition can do to all of us or is he liberated to pursue so much more now because he has been unshackled by what most have termed a burden for years now? The turnaround is swift. When the majors took on a new cadence starting in 2019, the year of Tiger’s 5th Masters title, it meant the majors would suffer no lag between major one and two each year. Four in four months and Tiger naturally was not equipped to begin another ascent so soon after breaking his own decade-plus long major drought at Bethpage. Brooks Koepka was amped to remind him that he had overcome his own 12th hole rinsing at Augusta in April of 2019 with an opening round 63 in the PGA with Tiger in his group. Rory will have his bounce because he was already arguably the biggest star who plays regularly and now he’s achieved something that many of the top players and the younger demographic who follow golf have never witnessed in their lives, a career grand slam.
He also returns to Quail Hollow which was the site of his first career PGA Tour title with a final round 62 in 2010 days before his 21st birthday. Since then, he’s added three additional wins at Quail Hollow including last year when he turned a two-shot deficit to Xander Schauffele on the 8th tee into a five-shot victory by undressing Quail’s inward nine. It’s his happiest haunt and his relationship with Quail Hollow extends beyond his mastery of the persistently changing golf course. It’s personal at Quail Hollow like it is for him at Augusta National. He has deep personal relationships at both places and actually attended the 2022 Presidents Cup incognito as an example of his affinity for the Harris family and the membership. Quail is simply what’s next and Oakmont and Royal Portrush make sense for Rory to contend but this is about much more than 2025.
Erosion is normally not something that gets your attention immediately. Over time you examine the way something once appeared and then years later it’s simply not the same. Complacency is similar. It’s subtle and only time will reveal the slightest easing off of one’s pursuit and the accompanying results that are marginally or dramatically impacted by the human condition. Achieve the greatest feats you possibly can especially if the pursuit is elongated, and it would be understandable if your mind found ways to rest. However, that arduous pursuit that hardened Rory McIlroy and taught him about how to find progress during moments of disappointment will likely override a sense of the job being completed. He’s always been a curious sort and it’s far more likely that his curiosity about what now will be the driving force for whatever is next.