McIlroy was hunting Tiger at age 9, says uncle

In an impressive early show of ambition and fearlessness, a nine-year-old Rory McIlroy wrote a letter to Tiger Woods warning he was coming for his crown as the world’s best golfer.

McIlroy recalled the letter in a New York Times Magazine profile by Charles Siebert.

Flushed with success after winning the 1998 Doral-Publix Junior Golf Classic in Florida, McIlroy decided to notify his boyhood hero, then world number one.

Brian McIlroy, Rory’s uncle and godfather, told Siebert the letter read something like this: ‘I’m coming to get you. This is the beginning. And McIlroy confirmed, somewhat sheepishly, that the letter had been mailed.

“A lot of those memories have kind of blurred together. But, yeah, it went something like that.”

McIlroy’s coach, Michael Bannon confirmed that the Holywood prodigy was already full of confidence in his ability.

“By the time Rory was 8, he was a golfer. He could hit the ball low, high, left to right, right to left, and he loved to tell people, ‘Look, watch this shot.’ Or if somebody was playing a shot, he’d join in and say, ‘I can do it better than you, watch me.’?”

And McIlroy insisted that devoting his childhood to his lucrative trade never seemed a chore, though he appreciates his father Gerry’s decision to step away from his son’s golf education when the boy was seven.

“I think it was very smart of my dad,” McIlroy said. “Because you could envision, down the road, me trying to be coached by my dad. It just gets to that stubborn teenager: Dad trying to tell him something, teenager doesn’t listen.”

McIlroy also told the magazine that he has always been comfortable in his own company on the golf course.

“I’m lucky that it’s not something that’s forced. “It’s just something that comes very naturally. I think as well I enjoy my own company. I enjoy solitude. Taking myself off for a couple of hours, and it’s just me and my thoughts.”

“It clears my head, and that’s something I’ve had since I was a kid.”

“It’s the environment I feel the most comfortable in. I don’t know why.”

Considering Bannon’s theory that McIlroy’s personality comes out in the graceful, flowing swing, the player commented:

“I guess probably what Michael is trying to say is that we have always felt my golf game, and my ball striking and my swing, matched up with how I am as a person. It’s free-flowing, it’s go-with-it, it’s simple, uncomplicated. And we always had this struggle, because my putting never matched up to my swing. It didn’t come as naturally. My putting got very static and sort of technical, and I would analyse it a lot, and there would be a lot of rigid movement, and that’s not me. That’s not the way I am as a person.”