It’s impossible to walk past the cabins woven down the left flank of Augusta’s tenth fairway and not think of a tousle-haired ghost trespassing on someone’s lawn there in 2 011.
ory McIlroy is broadly unrecognisable today from the kid who forgot how to play on that Masters Sunday back nine. He sometimes jokes about the physical contrast between then and now, the unrefined dress sense, the scarecrow hair, the palpable dread of someone who just got swallowed up by the scale of what his life had suddenly become.
McIlroy has described that moment he snap-hooked his drive on ten while still leading the tournament as “the only time my mind has gone blank on a golf course. It was like being hit by a punch.”
Soon he would three-putt 11, four-putt 12 and leave Augusta to the sound of a golf world mouthing gentle rosaries of pity. Greg Norman was among those who reached out with messages of encouragement, something McIlroy says today that he has always appreciated. But two months later, he would become the youngest winner of the US Open since Bobby Jones in 1923, breaking just about every scoring record with a 16-under finish at Congressional.
And three more Majors followed in three years. Turned out the kid wasn’t quite as brittle as Augusta National had implied.
Twelve years later, however, the flags still flutter in cold mockery here at his efforts to win a green jacket. Standing on the first tee yesterday, he was a gaping eight shots off the lead. Walking off the second green? 11.
The idea that he could shoot low to ignite a Masters challenge after yet another one of those undistinguished Thursday rounds ran aground so quickly, so brutally, he’d already been reduced to a tournament footnote while many of the principals were still just wiping sleep from their eyes.
Rory looked haunted and breakable in front of the giant white scoreboards, each one bellowing out the unavoidable truth that that career Grand Slam remained as far away as ever.
Smoke all but rose off those boards beside Brooks Koepka’s name, the LIV man back to that muscular, slashing style with which he’d won four Majors prior to suffering a bad knee injury.
The air is thin at this altitude when the world’s best golfers find perfect sync with their game, gasps of awe lifting regularly from the long spirals of humanity. Some weeks back, Rory reputedly needed just 19 putts to get around this golf course, feeding the idea (again) that this might finally be his time.
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The galleries audibly yearned for it to happen too. But Augusta turned her back.
To see him play so limply yesterday was to reach a suspicion that this isn’t a puzzle Bob Rotella or any of the game’s mind gurus have it in their gift to solve. As the bogeys accumulated, McIlroy carried all the fight of a puckered balloon.
We know this hurts him. There was that ripped shirt at The Earth Course in November ’21, the phone smashed off a locker in Dubai last January 12 months. There were the Ryder Cup tears at Whistling Straits. Sometimes people mistake McIlroy’s innate courtesy for an absence of pain when there’s clearly abundant turmoil within.
And his tone after Thursday’s 72 was dependably upbeat, the song of a prophet almost.
Earlier this week, Rory suggested that last year’s closing 64 was “a breakthrough” in psychological terms, something that sounded fanciful.
By any measure, that round registered as the charge of a man spared the consequence of failure. Rory, remember, never contended at last year’s tournament. Finishing second all but constituted a falsehood.
He has since lost friendships over LIV and the prominence of his role as the PGA’s most resolute and articulate spokesman. He has been acerbic enough to suggest that in Norman as a leader, the Saudi breakaway group maybe now lacks “an adult in the room”.
Yet coming here as world No 2, his game had seldom looked sharper or more stress proofed. And history, he assured us too, would hold no fears.
Well, history makes its own plans.
He was five-over for yesterday’s round by the time his first birdie arrived on 13. A second followed two holes later, only to be handed immediately back.
This wasn’t a fight to force his way into contention anymore. It became an unconvincing scramble to make the cut.
A bogey on 18 (his seventh of the day) – having carved his drive into trees down the right – left him closing with 77 and cursed to a weekend on the couch.
At least he was spared the indignity of having to hang around, the weather horn blaring just after he walked off the last. Better still, the threat of lightning meant all media wretches were hunted from the old oak tree under which they ordinarily hold their post-round interrogations.
But that was Augusta’s only kindness to Rory McIlroy this week, the opportunity to make a clean escape.
Unrecognisable in so many ways from the ghost of ’11 but gallingly unchanged in one. Still a man for whom this sanctified place stubbornly refuses to bend to his will. Will it ever?