Rory McIlroy’s back in hot water again but should we be cutting the 22-year-old more slack?
FROM a tender age Rory McIlroy was identified by many in Ireland as an exceptional talent.
Indeed by the time he turned professional in 2007, he was probably the best amateur in the world. Today, he is the US Open Champion and at a tender age of 22, he is the world’s 4th ranked player. He is regularly compared with the very best the game has ever produced, the man to replace Tiger and the next man to seriously challenge Nicklaus’s major haul of 18
professional titles.
As befits a man of McIlroy’s status, one of the most important decisions he has had to make early in his career was what sports management company was best qualified to serve his interests. While Rory focused solely on his game, it was his management company’s responsibility first and foremost to deflect any unwanted attention away from him, while also prioritising all other off-course activities such as managing his image and his profile around the world to scheduling his tournament play and, most importantly, tending to his commercial interests and contracts — all generated from his performances on the golf course.
To date, Rory’s exploits on the golf course have guaranteed him a standard of living that means he will never want for much for the rest of his life.
His career will now be defined by what he achieves in the game and when you are talking about Rory McIlroy, everything is possible.
Since his victory in the US Open, Rory status has moved from the category of superstar to megastar. Where once he had complete privacy in everything he did, now everything he does or says is forensically analysed. Now is the time for his management team to be working overtime! Securing the money was easy, minding his image and his brand is now the priority.
Anticipating issues is essential. It isn’t that difficult to know what sort of questions journalists are going to ask when you have a disappointing finish in a Major like the British Open?
Surely it is reasonable for Rory to understand how to handle an interview correctly or, if uncomfortable, to deflect the detail away to someone in his management team who can best handle the situation? If so, then why have we witnessed the unfortunate incidents of the past couple of weeks?
To be fair to ISM, Rory may well want full control over everything he says and does in public, but is that right? No, because I believe that when things do not come out quite the way he wants them to, it only serves to deflect his attention away from his primary goal of winning tournament and titles.
As if to make my point, this week’s affair may well have been started by Jay Townsend, but the very public manner of Rory’s response on Twitter, no matter how exasperated he was, has drawn undue attention to him in America in advance of his return next week for the WGC event in Ohio and the USPGA the following week. The timing is bad and Rory would have been better off going into those events focusing completely on his game and dealing with questions solely about his golf.
Twitter can be a great social medium but just this week Mick McCarthy brought lawyers into Wolves to advise players of the do’s and don’ts of twitter. Was he right? Yes. A good manager does not want unwanted attention drawn to his team or his player. He understood the potential dangers associated with his players using it carelessly.
Rory is a great kid.
He is young too and this week unfortunately he has had to learn another very harsh lesson, only this time it was off the golf course. I can only hope that ISM too has learned something from this past week.
THERE have been times when I wished Rory McIlroy had taken time to formulate an answer before expressing a view on anything that might be regarded as controversial.
The remark, for instance, that he “looked forward to being a member of Team UK” after it was announced that golf would be part of the Olympic Games rankled with many — and not just those with nationalistic leanings or the members of the GUI who had helped him along the way in his amateur days.
More recently, there was his view that the bad weather had effectively cost him his chance of the British Open and that he couldn’t wait to get back to playing in the more weather-friendly United States. That hardly gelled with his decision late last year to abandon his membership of the PGA Tour.
And now we have the rumpus about the Twitter spat between him and the American television commentator Jay Townsend. I must admit that telling Townsend to “shut up” and describing him as “a failed golfer” was unworthy of the fourth best golfer on the planet.
However, who gave Townsend, whose only claim to fame on the golf course was to finish runner-up in the Catalan Open in 1993, the right to state that McIlroy had been guilty of “some of the worst course management I have seen beyond U10 boys golf competition?” The tone of the comment surely indicates that Townsend has a bee in his bonnet regarding McIlroy and his caddie JP Fitzgerald.
That agenda was referred to by McIlroy, who described this latest incident as “the straw that broke the camel’s back”. It first became apparent after Rory’s meltdown in the Masters, where Townsend was openly critical of Fitzgerald, and was followed on Thursday by another uppercut that “JP allowed some shocking course management today”.
Furthermore, he would have been better advised to praise McIlroy for the magnificent manner in which he accepted the mortification of that hugely publicised collapse. It was a massive ask of any 22-year-old but Rory held his head high as he bounced off the 18th green and courageously turned to face the media.
It reminded me of a similar development after he followed up his opening round of 63 in last year’s British Open with an 80 in dreadful conditions the next day. Many presumed he would slip quietly away but again he faced the reporters and microphones.
Fast forward to this year’s US Open, where McIlroy turned in an astonishing performance to claim the title by eight shots. The man on the bag again was a certain JP Fitzgerald. Where was Jay Townsend then? Where was the eulogy to this remarkable young man who clearly connected comfortably with the man by his side?
Between them, they got everything spot on to forge a result all the more astonishing after the happenings in Georgia and with the eyes of the sporting world burning a hole in his young back.
I have one or two questions for Jay Townsend and the others who would have a go at Rory McIlroy.
What were you like when you were 22? Did you ever say or do something in the heat of the moment that you quickly regretted?
Given that Jay and other knockers have never found themselves in that situation — even in their career prime — how could one begin to understand the pressures on McIlroy on that Sunday in Georgia?
Rory, my advice to you in future is to treat these people with the contempt of your silence — and to stick loyally by JP Fitzgerald — and whoever may succeed him in time — by repeating the words of Thursday night: “I stand by my caddie.”
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