Managing weight of expectation

Rory McIlroy has the best swing in golf — how far can it take the one-time child prodigy, asks Charles Siebert.

Even before Rory McIlroy could walk, he was envisioning the shots of his dreams. The story has been related to him countless times: how back in the early 1990s, his father, Gerry, then a bar manager at the local golf club in Holywood, Co Down, would put his 18-month-old son — in his father’s daily care while his mother, Rosie, a night-shift worker at a nearby 3M plant, slept — in a pram and wheel him a half-mile or so from the McIlroys’ small, red-brick house on Belfast Road to the club, its 18-hole course on the outskirts of Belfast nestled into a tiered wooded hillside. When his day shift ended, Gerry, an avid golfer, would bring his son out to the range, set his pram behind the practice tee and swat out buckets of balls before his transfixed toddler.

Gerry would hit balls and Rory would just sit there looking, his head going back and forth following the swing and the ball’s flight. “I often think to myself of those early days of him just sitting there doing that,” recalled Holywood Golf Club’s former pro and current general manager, Paul Gray, when we met in Northern Ireland last November. “There’s a lot to be said for kids who see something that they want but can’t get yet. I often wonder if that’s what did it.”