There’s a scene in episode two of the Netflix series Full Swing, where a disconsolate Brooks Koepka is sitting down for dinner after his opening 73 at last year’s Masters.
nce pugnacious, he seems broken here. A winner of four Majors across three seasons between 2017 and ’19, Koepka has come to interpret a kind of robotised game around him now in which the best players seem out of reach because they appear to play without any discernible psychological investment.
“I’ll be honest with you, I can’t compete with these guys week-in, week-out,” he says flatly.
Koepka is destined to miss the cut at Augusta, a fate he later acknowledges left him feeling profoundly embarrassed ,“and I never felt that way leaving a golf tournament before”.
It’s clear that nobody casts a darker shadow in his thoughts than Scottie Scheffler, who within six weeks of winning his first PGA tournament has added three more (including the Masters) in a 57-day span to climb to world No 1.
The scene is intriguing because of the sense of helplessness it communicates from a player previously renowned, not so much for out-lasting opponents in a Major setting, as ignoring them.
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He is palpably intimidated by the impassive, Huckleberry Finn-type deportment of Scheffler, a player who – he suggests – appears to compete while thinking about “absolutely nothing”.
No course collapses confidence quite as effortlessly as Augusta National. It has a beauty you could drown in but within that beauty resides a casual, everyday capacity to cauterise even the most resilient brain.
Rory McIlroy’s revelation that he has visualised being in the Butler Cabin on Sunday night, Scheffler stepping towards him with a green jacket in his hands, sounded like a strategy straight out of the Bob Rotella playbook.
Everything you hear from a player at Augusta prior to Masters Thursday amounts to some kind of self-psyching gambit. The challenge is to de-mystify what lies ahead, turn the temperature down inside your head.
McIlroy clearly possesses the physical tools to win this week, but then so do maybe 20 others in the 88-strong field.
It won’t help that he must wait until 6.48pm (Irish time) to tee-off in today’s penultimate grouping, a delay sure to challenge even Rotella’s wisdom in terms of silencing the ticking of a clock. After all, Jon Rahm, Justin Thomas and Cameron Smith start roughly three hours earlier.
Imagine one or all are deep into red digits by the time he steps to the first-tee? Would Rory be anything other than human to suddenly see only landing areas the size of fireside rugs?
Tiger Woods’s insistence on Tuesday that McIlroy will, almost inevitably, win a green jacket sounded more a vote of friendship than a declaration of certainty. He clearly understands the purchase that McIlroy places on his word.
The finishing scene in episode eight of Full Swing follows McIlroy to the locker room immediately after he has secured $18m for winning a third FedEx Cup with his victory in the Tour Championship at East Lake.
Sipping a glass of red wine, he is checking his phone for messages. Conscious of the Netflix cameras, McIlroy lets it be known that he’s just received a text message from Woods.
“He’s always the first, Tiger,” he says. “Always the first. Like he’ll text you before the last putt drops. He’s unreal!”
What you see is a 33-year-old man almost child-like in his delight at having that connection with Woods.
But had the roles been reversed, could you possibly imagine Tiger divulging the identity of someone messaging him?
This is transparently one man still worshipping another and it just feels a little clawing. Maybe it’s perverse to interpret something uncomfortable in that moment, especially given the snapshot comes at a time McIlroy is returning to the top of the world rankings.
And so much of McIlroy throughout 2022, specifically in his anchor role as a PGA Tour fire-fighter for their battle with LIV, offered a reminder of the steely figure who so famously blanked the giddy, tee-box small-talk of Phil Mickelson and Rickie Fowler en route to his last Major win, the 2014 PGA Championship at Valhalla.
There’s a theory now – and it isn’t entirely implausible – that that role, specifically the adversarial nature of his engagements with Greg Norman – has instilled something new in McIlroy.
And when on song, as he has been rather a lot of late, McIlroy’s game brings to mind something Bruce Crompton said of Jack Nicklaus after the ’75 PGA Championship.
“We all suffer from human deficiencies,” said Crompton. “Jack just suffers from fewer of them!”
McIlroy in green on Sunday night makes sense on just about every level, especially with a cold front blowing in for the weekend. But Augusta challenges every assumption, explores every tiny weakness.
In his book, Your 15th Club – The Inner Secrets to Great Golf, Rotella writes of Pádraig Harrington’s demeanour on Saturday night of the ’07 Open Championship at Carnoustie. Lying third in the field and six shots behind Sergio Garcia, Harrington betrayed not the faintest shred of anxiety.
They had rented a house close to the golf course and Rotella recalls Harrington saying to a friend: “I hope you’ve taken Monday off!”
When asked why, he replied: “Because I’m going to win!”
You can use every trick in the book to reach that kind of tranquillity yet, ultimately, nobody swings the club for you. Koepka was once the most intimidating man in golf, but an aura fades when you stop turning up at the highest altitude.
He got a reputed $100m signing-on fee from LIV and, though victorious last weekend, admits he’d give back every single dollar he’s won in the game just to experience the feeling of winning another Major.
Nine years on from Valhalla and wealthy beyond measure, McIlroy’s yearning surely runs even deeper now. In the blossom-sweetened air of Georgia, only he can subdue that ache.