With McIlroy at the Masters

If you don’t love this, you don’t love life.

Golf, if you allow it, teaches forbearance.

The Dean of Discipline presiding over my collegiate life was no golfer. He hadn’t learnt the game’s lessons and wouldn’t have recognized Rory McIlroy if he was sat on the bench in front of him, so the morning after young Rory’s first major triumph, failing to see it as just cause, he threw the book at our sodden watch party. For our part in the drama, including giving the powers that be the runaround and, upon apprehension, assuming false identities, we were hit with 12 hours of hard labour in the gardens, time served at three successive sunrises and primarily spent hand-trimming the edges of the Augusta-green lawns we’d danced on in the early hours.

Hanging over the edging and the daybreak alarms was the risk that failure to comply would result in being designated by the Dean as persona non grata, on its own distinguishing, but regrettably paired with a ban on being allowed to graduate, which would have been a shame having already taken the trouble to sit all the exams.

Despite the Dean’s best efforts, though, the worst of the damage was self-inflicted: one accomplice suffered through the dirty dozen and then had to spend the next decade and a half coming to terms with the mysterious disappearance of his undergarments, including his favourite tie. Looking back on it all, the turning point was that fateful morning after, when, having awoken in his own bed and counted it as a good outcome all things considered, he became aware he’d done so wearing his blazer, brogues, and nothing else.

Which is to say I and many of my nearest and dearest have been in the tank with Rory since the very beginning. Without his epic meltdown on the homeward holes at the Masters in April 2011, and us all having lived through that setback together, putt by punishing putt, there is no watershed moment at the US Open on the final Sunday of finals term in June.

I always arch an eyebrow when in one breath somebody tells me they can’t comprehend the fascination with sport, and in the next that they love novels or films or prestige TV or reality TV or good old-fashioned gossip. And not only because book club too rarely ends with a communal dip in the lake. What, if not a slice of life’s rich tapestry laid out in narrative longform, one of our too few antidotes to vertical video, do sceptics think sport is?

The ecstasy of summer 2011, a function of an excruciating spring, was mere prelude.

With the major monkey off his back, Rory took up his mantle as the rightful heir to Tiger, who was publicly and privately living out his own tragic downfall at the same time. Ascendant Rory won the PGA Championship in 2012 and The Open (and another PGA) in 2014, leaving only absolution at the Masters between himself, the career Grand Slam, and the attendant immortality.¹

Then a silverback gorilla glommed onto his shoulders and started taking steroids.

If you didn’t want to spend a decade listening to Drake find countless ways to say it’s too much to be famous these days, you could tune in each April to watch Rory wage one forlorn battle after another around Augusta. He was just like us, imperfect and striving, only with all the dials turned up to 11. In his 10 attempts to tame the course and his silverback between 2015 and 2024, he didn’t get close.² Third round leads: zero. Second place finishes: one, off the back of a pressure-free final round 64, having already fallen 10 shots behind. First round scores: high and climbing, breaking 70 only once, and in the four years between 2019 and 2022 carding a pair of 73s, a shocking 75, and a not-surprising-anymore 76. In 2023, he gets Thursday under something resembling control and then course corrects with a Friday 77. In 2024, he keeps Thursday under control and then…course corrects with a Friday 77. He was a different man here than he was anywhere else, consistently taking himself clean out of the picture before anyone could accuse him of being in contention.

April 2025. Rory is 11 years and 38 starts removed from his last major win, 10 months removed from missing two short putts in the final three holes while leading the US Open, and, despite it all, world number two and the bookies’ second favourite. Rather than treating him as cursed or insane, bettors gave him about a 1-in-8 chance of doing the same very hard chaotic thing ever so slightly differently and getting a different result. Success, as the smart money knows and we all too easily forget, is a mess.³

Through 14 holes he’s 4-under par, on track to open in the 60s for the first time since 2018 and looking for all the world a heavyweight contender. But this is Rory on Thursday at Augusta, so he manufactures two double-bogeys out of nothing and cards a level-par 72, same old story. Friday, though, the low round of the day, 66. Saturday, no relapse, 66 again, and a two-shot third-round lead. The promise and perils of Sunday don’t bear thinking about, or as Butch Harmon would say, if you don’t love this, you don’t love golf.⁴

People have missed the cut at seminary for producing things half as nakedly hackneyed as this particular Sunday script. Rory’s lead evaporates in all of one hole, an opening double-bogey, hell. Then he gets hot, leading by four on the 10th tee, exactly as he had 14 years earlier before turning to a pillar of salt. This time, though, 10’s a birdie. Old-timers knew, of course, to hold their horses, gripping tighter after bogey at 11. Drowning sorrows’ odds drop like a stone as an in-his-sleep wedge into the 13th green dives into the creek, another double-bogey. 14, bogey, lead all gone, the room swimming for millions. Not Rory, though, not this time. Ship steadied off the tee at 15, setting up the shot of his life around the corner over the water for an eagle chance. Naturally, though, a tentative putt means settling for birdie and a fleeting lead soon snuffed out by another’s birdie up ahead, now friend and foe Justin Rose the leader in the clubhouse. Unperturbed, or so it seems on Rory’s surface, another sublime birdie at 17 and again the outright lead, he needs par at the last to slay the silverback.

Alas! From the middle of the fairway, the in-his-daydreams wedge lands in the greenside bunker, up-and-down eludes as another short putt slides by, bogey, devastation. The millions deflate with him.

He might never have a better chance than that, yet he does still have a chance. A head-to-head sudden-death playoff for all the marbles. Back in the middle of the 18th fairway, fate has him hitting the same shot again which just cost him the title, his whole damned experience reliving the same failure on repeat collapsed into 20 endless minutes.

Somehow, his sympathetic nervous system allows him to address his ball and swing his wedge, the millions long since behind our sofas. Somehow, he swings straight and true, finds the heart of the green, uses spin and slope to get it to a gimme, and suddenly this birdie putt is the best chance he’s ever had.

Drained: the putt, the blood from his face, the air from his chest, and anybody who’d been in the tank with him for what seemed like several lifetimes.

Training data

• 📖The Golf Omnibus (c. 1920). Wodehouse on the Great Mystery is an unbridled joy.

• 📖Chaos (1997). It’s not the theory I thought it was, and it explains so much more about how cause, effect, and randomness coexist.

• 📝The Secret History of Tiger Woods (2016). Wright Thompson’s shocking-and-surprising insight into what intense pressure can do to even the steeliest mind. My favourite piece of sportswriting, and best enjoyed paired with Charles P. Pierce’s Tiger Woods, the Man. Amen. (1997).

• 🎵Batphone (2018). “I want an interesting synonym / To describe this thing / That you say we’re all grandfathered in / I’ll use the search engine / We’ve got much to discuss / Too much to discuss over a bucket of balls.”⁵

• 📺The Final Five Holes (2025). Best paired, if you’re a sicko, with Rory Meltdown (2011). Drink it in.

1. The career Grand Slam is winning all four majors: the US Open, the PGA Championship, The Open, and the Masters. Six men have done it. (The Grand Slam, no premodifier, would be winning all four in the same year, which nobody has done. Tiger held all four simultaneously when he won the 2001 Masters having won the other three in 2000. He was something else, before he wasn’t any more. While he was, he broke our intuitions about how often the best golfers are expected to win.)

2. Despite being the best or one of the best players in the world for most of this decade, ranked world number one at various points during 2015, 2020, 2022, and 2023.

3. Accounting for Rory’s fame and popularity (which brings in dumb money behind him) and large fields making golf futures relatively unattractive to sharps (who can more easily take advantage of/impose discipline on markets with higher frequency and fewer possible outcomes), it seems unlikely that the best available models gave Rory less than 10% win probability. And if it seems impossible his victimhood was anchored in variance, the likelihood of winning zero of the 38 majors during the drought, assuming he had on average a 10% chance at each, was a mere 1.8%: unlikely but hardly requiring of mystical explanation. Success is a mess.

4. Butch for a long time was Tiger’s coach, and is now one of the few commentators who can combine being in the know, in love with the game, and in on the joke.

5. “...It's the big night in Tinsel City / Life became a spectator sport.”