Rory McIlroy and the case against fate

It was never going to be easy. But not even the most masochistic of Rory McIlroy’s fans can have expected it to be quite this hard.

For a decade since the harvesting of his first four majors, golf fans have watched McIlroy have his heart cut out by near miss after near miss. It has seemed inevitable so often, and yet the script got flipped in new and painful passages of tragedy.

There has been brilliance but on secondary stages, year-long excellence without the pure moments of bliss. All consistency and no transcendence. FedEx cups but no delivery of the prizes he wanted more than anything. As if Father Christmas started focusing on postcards and forgot Christmas Day. Rory managed solidity at St Andrews when Cam Smith found inspiration. He put us through the pathos of Pinehurst, a pushed putt from perfection.

If this was fiction, an editor would have long-since stepped in. We get it, he’s flawed. You’ve made your point. Now change things up. The middle is sagging. Move to the end. To the triumph. It’s coming. Right? Right from three feet at Pinehurst. Right on 13 at Augusta. Right on 18. No. Not that right. No please.

The 2025 Masters would have been a different order of loss the ones that had come before. On previous occasions a putt here or there has cost Rory. Not a wedge shovelled so far right of target and so far back in time—Rory surely hasn’t hit so poor a simple shot in 30 years—that it could have joined the Axis powers in WWII. It was the equivalent of a tennis player serving four straight double faults at 5-0 up in the deciding set. And yet, in golf, unlike so many sports, a single tweak or twinge can upset everything. There are no second serves, just one taunting little dimpled ball in a field of green, which, with the slightest loss of commitment, the slightly frailty of nerve, can veer off into the worst direction possible, costing you everything.

To watch Rory make the historic seem inevitable and then impossible and then inevitable again, then impossible, then inevitable, again, and again was to confront the complete strangeness of being tortured by and then euphoric for a complete stranger.

In the Butler Cabin, for once not too twee as a ceremony, it was put to Rory as question not statement that he had made a lot of people happy, and surely in terms of depth of feeling, there can rarely have been a more popular or deserving winner of anything ever.

What is it about Rory that makes us care? Is it because at a time of schism in golf, he has been unafraid to speak his mind, to show his feelings, to let those feelings evolve? Is it because his voice, like his golf, shifts from certainty to vulnerability in a way that is so utterly human?

Is it because he can play the sort of golf from the gods that took him to five under through five on Saturday, that marched towering irons into the 15th hole not once but twice on the weekend, the six iron on 7 that made a mockery of physics?

Or is it because he can follow that with the sort of nonsense he served up on 15 and 17 on day one, on 13 and 18 in regulation on Sunday.

He embodies, more than any sportsman ever, Alexander Pope’s concept of bathos, the passage from the sublime to the ridiculous, the lofty to the vulgar. Here, in pursuit of greatness Rory rode that road out and back, time after time in a way the other greats have never truly suffered. He defies gravity and then sanity, sometimes in the same hole.

At Augusta Rory was trying to block the world out, but even then we could not help but glimpse his human frailty. The grimace on one, the hip hinge on two. Lips wobbled. Limbs shook. It matters, this golf thing. And that’s ok. In fact that’s more than ok.

In Julian Barnes’ The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, the final section features a man who takes up golf in an afterlife of infinite possibilities. Initially, like all of us, he struggles and yet is quickly hooked. And yet, unlike us, he swiftly improves. Each round is better than the last. Eventually, soon (time is uncertain here) he is perfect. 18 holes-in-one. Every time. And with that, the love wanes.

Rory gives us glimpses of faultlessness. And then he reminds us that perfection is neither possible nor really desirable. Things mean more if they’re hard earned, if they’re grafted not given. There is no courage without fear. There is no mastery without doubt and difficulty. Nobody has ever won the Masters with four double bogeys, and they may never do so again.

For so long, it looked like the moment meant too much, and who could blame him for that. He was playing to beecome the fifth man to achieve the career grand slam, competing against deeper fields than ever. To become the greatest European player of all time. To be a legend in his own time. Imagine if Van Gogh had sold some paintings. But also if Van Gogh had done so after spending a decade reading a thousand takes a week on why his brushwork couldn’t cut it when the moment counted.  

How could it not overwhelm? How could anybody stand and walk, let alone master the minute muscle-memory mechanics of a golf swing under asphyxiating pressure?

And yet, as he has throughout his career, Rory rose to an occasion that would rout another, an occasion that had routed everyone else for a quarter of a century.

After missing the tiddler to win it in regulation, you felt the adversity had peaked. The oxygen was too thin now. There was no coming back from this disaster. Justin Rose had everything to win. Rory everything to lose. It felt almost indecent to send the man to a playoff after all that. Let him down gently. Grant him Zootopia and cuddles with his daughter and maybe something to ease the pain. Irish Whisky was the hopeful, prayerful tranquiliser of choice in this household. All Rory got was whatever liquid dregs remained in his emotional support Yeti.

And yet, Rory refused to fold. There was a little more pain for the taking, a little more for the giving. Somehow he summoned another perfect drive. Somehow the scar tissue of his pushed approach mere minutes before was forgotten. Cauterise the wound and hand him back his sword. This time the putt of destiny was even shorter.

As it dropped there came a chest wracking exorcism of fourteen years of doubts. Well he wept for his own extraordinary resilience. Well so many wept to watch it.

For so long the discourse has been that Rory was destined to win the Masters. That it was written. There were moments on Sunday where it felt just so, when he turned around the first two shot swing with a brace of two-shot swings of his own, when his ball stopped a roll from disaster on 11, when his rival’s hopes drowned moments later. Even Nike’s triumphant advert leaned into the suggestion that the jacket was always waiting for him. And yet the unpoetic truth is that it wasn't. He could easily have lost. Almost anyone else would. The jacket wasn't waiting. It wasn’t written. He had to write it himself. The utterly astonishing thing is that he did.