Rory ready to open up Bethpage

YOU could, if you were so inclined, put it down to the precociousness of youth, but Rory McIlroy sees no reason why he shouldn’t win the US Open in his first appearance this week if most things fall into place.

Debutants don’t often win major championships and it hasn’t happened in this tournament since Francis Ouimet beat Harry Vardon in a play-off in 1913, an occasion subsequently recorded in one of golf’s finest books, “The Greatest Game Ever Played.” But McIlroy isn’t fazed by that stat or even that Tiger Woods has been installed as 7/4 favourite and seems to be in unbeatable form if the evidence of his victory in the Memorial at Muirfield Village the other week can be taken at face value.

“Hopefully I can go out and play the way I know I can and if that happens, I know I can challenge,” McIlroy claims. “As the 18th best player in the world, I should be able to challenge. It’s as simple as that. I probably wouldn’t be able to tell whether this is as hard a course as I’ve played until after Thursday when they’ve put the pins in for tournament play and we’ve played a competitive round.

“But I do think they’ve set it up very fairly. If you miss the fairway in the second cut, you can still get to the green. So it gives you a chance, if you have a decent lie, to get it up somewhere on the green and get it up and down. It rewards you for playing good shots and if you don’t play good shots, it will punish you and that’s the way it should be.”

McIlroy is looking forward to all the hype and hullabaloo traditionally associated with a sporting event staged in New York.

“They are quite vocal and that’s great,” McIlroy enthused. “Obviously there will be an amazing atmosphere around 15, 16, 17, that little triangle will be fantastic and I’m looking forward to it all. Hopefully, the crowds will get behind me and give me a little bit of support. It helps that this is a public golf course and some of them will have played it before.

“I remember watching the 2002 US Open on TV. I was in the States at the time playing in a junior tournament and was thinking to myself how I’d really love to play there one day. I remember how it looked like an extremely long, extremely difficult golf course. And yet the rough’s not as bad this time as it was in 2002.”

Bethpage Black contains three holes in excess of 500 yards and another three are well over 450 with the combined total coming to 7,426 yards. McIlroy takes a positive from that, although he fully appreciates the problems presented by the 525-yard 7th and the 12th, which stretches to 504 yards.

“I played on Monday with Darren Clarke, Lee Westwood and Adam Scott and I had the best drive of the four of us at the 7th and still had 230 yards to the pin,” he reported. “It took a three wood to get home from there because it was very soft after all the rain. It’s a really, really long hole and if it’s as wet as it was yesterday, I’m sure they’ll push the tee up. But it’s 525 yards and so if you make four 4s, you’re doing pretty well.”

Accordingly, McIlroy made his way to the Titleist wagon and asked to have a three iron – a club he doesn’t normally carry – made to his specifications with a view to putting it in the bag along with the five wood and to the exclusion of one of his three wedges.

Although McIlroy was involved in some rules controversy in the second round of the Masters last April, he survived into the weekend and went on to play the last 10 holes of his final round in a superb four under par.

“I finished 20th there but felt as if I played well enough,” he mused. “Another top 20 finish would be great. But I want to try and do better than that. It’s all still new to me. I don’t quite know what way the golf course will be set up. But if I go out and play the way I know I can, I know I’m capable of shooting under par on this golf course.”

Rory has had one win and five other top five finishes in Europe and still admitted to being unhappy with some of his performances, not least the most recent in the English Open a couple of weeks ago. “I could have won it with a 70 in the final round and that was a big disappointment.”

Since then, though, he has had a fortnight off to chill out and knock around with his pals and girlfriend Hollie back in Holywood. And they took the opportunity to acquire a labradoodle called Theo.

But he looked decidedly ill-at-ease when Sky TV’s promo build-up for the tournament was raised, how they rave all about Woods and then seem to suggest his main challenger is the 20 year-old Irishman. How did he feel about that kind of stuff? “It’s nothing, really,” he blushed. “What I want to say is that I feel like I’m driving the ball really, really well and obviously you need to do that in the US Open.”

And the Tiger factor? Does McIlroy or indeed anyone else in the 156 strong field have a chance of beating him if he brings along his A game? “If he plays the way he did the last round at the Memorial, then no,” he admitted. “But I can’t control what he does or what anyone else does. I just have to go out and play my golf. If it’s good enough, it’s good enough. If it’s not, so be it. Guys don’t go into majors thinking I have to do this or that to beat Tiger. They go in and concentrate on their own game. If their own game isn’t good enough, then that’s the way it goes. And, yes, I’d love to play with him on Sunday.”