Troubled Rory seeks a way on to Open road

American milk cartons often feature pleas for information about tragic cases of child abduction — mysterious tales of disappearances that would soften even the hardest of hearts.

What then, one asks, has become of the curly haired wunderkind who wowed the world with his golf when he burst on the scene as an amateur and won the Silver Medal in the British Open at Carnoustie in 2007? What happened to the Rory McIlroy that had America and the world eating out of his hand with the way he so manfully took his 2011 Masters collapse on the chin? Why aren’t we hearing about the fact he spent all of last Saturday, not practising for The Open at Muirfield but making a dream come true for 16-year-old Spanish boy suffering from cancer by playing a round of golf with him at nearby Archerfield?

As Barry Funston, the newly appointed head of the Rory Foundation said at Muirfield this week: “I always look at him just as the young man I know. The young kid that I knew.