Managing weight of expectation
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.”
Golf is woven deep into the McIlroy make-up. Rory’s grandfather, Jimmy, a crane repairman near the Belfast docks where the Titanic was built, was one of the best players at Holywood, and he encouraged his three sons, Gerry, Colm and Brian, to play as well. Of the three, Gerry would emerge as the clear standout, an excellent scratch golfer who won a number of club tournaments and once shot a course record in Donegal.
Shepherding little white spheres along hushed green Holywood fairways with holes named Nuns Walk and Abbot’s Wood might seem a world away from the Troubles. But that violence struck home with the McIlroys. One night in November 1972, McIlroy’s great grand-uncle Joseph, his grandfather Jimmy’s brother, was gunned down at the age of 30 in the kitchen of the home he shared with his wife and four daughters, one of the few Catholic families who dared to move into the predominantly Protestant area of east Belfast.
By 1989, the year Rory was born, somehow all the disparate strains of McIlroy golfing talent now were allowed to flourish in the newest arrival. By 7, he’d become Holywood’s youngest-ever member.
“I remember when he was a little kid,” Paul Gray said, “we’d all be back up here, looking down from the clubhouse window at him out there still practising for maybe five hours, hitting balls or pitching around the green until dark.”
There’s a video from those days shot by McIlroy’s long-time golf coach, Michael Bannon: his eight-year-old pupil, club in hand, standing out on the practice green of the club. “Hey,” you can hear Bannon asking at the start, “what you shoot today?”
“Eighty-six,” a squeaky-voiced figure says, looking up from his ball, a pair of protuberant ears framing a wide-smiling, cherubic face.
“Good man. When’s your birthday? In another month? Good man. Let’s see you swing the club, then.”
It’s there already: the same sweet, full-sweeping parabola, nothing withheld, the club wrapped all the way back around its fully torqued wielder, his own head nearly swallowed in a self-imposed half-nelson. As you watch, all the parallels with McIlroy’s boyhood idol, Tiger Woods, come to mind: each was an only-child prodigy who putted and drove golf balls before agog TV-talk-show hosts and audiences. They were singularly driven wunderkinds who possessed that same quiet self-confidence that moved a nine-year-old McIlroy, who had just claimed the 1998 Doral-Publix Junior Golf Classic in Florida (among the scant few titles Woods never won), to sit down one morning at home and fashion a decidedly double-edged fan note to his childhood hero, then holding the world No. 1 ranking. No one can recall the note’s precise wording, but its general thrust, as Brian McIlroy, Rory’s uncle and godfather, paraphrased in an email, put Woods on notice: “I’m coming to get you.”
When I met McIlroy, now the world’s No. 1 golfer, in New York in December, I asked him about the letter. “A lot of those memories have kind of blurred together,” he said somewhat sheepishly. “But, yeah, it went something like that.”
McIlroy’s “Tiger letter” most likely never got to its intended addressee, but by now its message surely has. McIlroy has already won the US Open, the Open and two PGA Championships, becoming just the third golfer, after Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, to win four majors by the age of 25. The only major he hasn’t won is the Masters. A victory at Augusta would give him a career grand slam — a feat accomplished by only five other golfers, and by only one younger than McIlroy: Woods.
It is uncertain whether Woods will ever regain a semblance of his former mastery, just as it is unknown whether McIlroy, or anybody, could ever be the next Tiger Woods. Woods hasn’t notched a victory in 20 months, yet he has still won an astounding 26% of the tournaments he has entered (Jack Nicklaus, an 18-time major winner, won 12.7%). Woods has also played an unparalleled part in elevating pro golf to a multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry and spawned a new global generation of superb golf athletes, making it all the more unlikely such a transcendent figure could ever emerge again. All of which makes McIlroy’s rise to the top of his sport that much more intriguing.
McIlroy “could turn out to be the best player in the world in his time,” Gary Player, a nine-time major winner, said in 2009 after McIlroy closed out his first Masters appearance at age 19 with six birdies and four pars on his last 10 holes. “This young man is brilliant,” Player said. “His theory side, his swing, is better than Tiger Woods’s.”
Before McIlroy’s US Open victory in 2011 at Congressional, Ernie Els proclaimed him good enough to “change golf history”.
Comparisons with the likes of Nicklaus and Woods seem at best woefully premature, even when they come from the two golf legends themselves. In the wake of that same 2011 US Open, Woods acknowledged that McIlroy, then 22, had a better swing than he did at that age. Nicklaus capped off McIlroy’s fourth major, last year’s PGA Championship at Valhalla in Louisville, Kentucky, by proclaiming, “Rory has an opportunity to win 15 or 20 majors or whatever he wants to do.” And yet in a mind-bendingly precise and difficult sport like golf, there are qualities and essences, far more subtle and, in the end, more substantive than mere victory totals, that define greatness.
Pro golf is in many ways better viewed today on TV than on the course. With sophisticated camera work, computer simulation, slow-motion-swing and shot-tracer technology, TV viewers are able to engage in the physical arc of individual shots and to appreciate what finely tuned outdoor pool sharks pro golfers essentially are, playing the angles, cushions and caroms of vast, undulant tables with 18 ever-shifting and often sinisterly sequestered pockets. We duffers wield the most forgiving grade of clubs, designed to tolerate and adjust for our errant strikes. Pros play blades, clubs with smaller and yet more powerful sweet spots, their double-edged dynamism yielding both greater rewards and greater rebukes.
McIlroy uses these clubs to play a particularly audacious game. “When you play full-throttle aggressive all the time the way guys like Rory do, the slightest mistakes get magnified,” McIlroy’s avuncular caddie, JP Fitzgerald, explained when I caught up with him after the Honda Classic in Palm Beach Gardens.
Following McIlroy around at the tournament did give me my first up-close feel for the force and grace of his game. He has a rare knack for hitting majestic shots with fairway woods — as well as those with 2- and 3-irons, clubs most pros long ago eschewed for hybrids — that fly absurdly high and far and yet land as softly as a green-side flop shot. With a driver, he’s a wizard of the controlled whale, a swing as singularly lovely to watch as a Roger Federer one-handed backhand and yet so unbridled — McIlroy’s club head speed has been clocked at close to 125mph — that, as McIlroy’s uncle Brian put it to me: If you or I were to try to take a swing like that, we’d fall flat on our faces.
“There’s a lovely zip to it, isn’t there?” McIlroy’s coach, Michael Bannon, said to me one morning, the two of us staring at Bannon’s computer screen at the Bangor GC, where he and McIlroy have worked together over the years. Bannon, a longtime pro at Holywood before moving up the road to Bangor, had just slipped in a DVD of an 18-year-old McIlroy hitting drives into a net in the club’s swing room, the thwack of each explosive strike often ripping the rubber tee away from the carpet, Bannon told me.
Eddie McCormack, a talented amateur golfer from Galway, knows intimately the power — literal and psychological — of that swing. In 2005, McCormack, who was 32, lost a head-to-head battle to the 16-year-old McIlroy in the final round at the Irish Amateur Close Championship. In a story McCormack later related in a biography written by Justin Doyle, he said his plan going into that Sunday showdown had been not to look at the young phenomenon.
“I held true to my plan and did not look at his play until it was nearly over,” McCormack said. “But I could hear his ball striking, and I had never heard, and have still never heard to this day, anything like it. I’ll put it this way: The sound of his ball striking is amazing. It’s the sound of the whack that he makes. It’s crisp, clean and it is perfect. It is the same on every single shot he makes.” He then added, “If there were 20 players striking the ball, and you were blindfolded, you would unquestionably know the sound of Rory’s strike.”
In all the early videos Bannon showed me of McIlroy as a boy, the other aspect of his play that he pointed to was the ever-present smile on his face when he was out on the course with a club in his hands. “By the time Rory was eight, he was a golfer,” Bannon said. A youngster happily going about the business of becoming great. “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.’”
McIlroy said that turning his life over to golf was his own idea. “I’m lucky that it’s not something that’s forced,” he told me in New York. In town on a promotional tour, he met with me in a lounge at Golf & Body NYC — a Midtown Manhattan indoor country club featuring computer-simulated whackable fairways. The diminutive 5ft 9ins, 160lbs dynamo who once launched a 436-yard drive was now comfortably clad in faded blue jeans, a hooded gray sweatshirt, sneakers and a curl-crushing woolly gray hat, looking for all the world like any scruffy, slightly sleepy teenager just mucking about in his room. “It’s just something that comes very naturally,” he said. “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.” He paused. “It clears my head, and that’s something I’ve had since I was a kid,” he said. “It’s the environment I feel the most comfortable in. I don’t know why.”
McIlroy’s parents quickly recognised their only child’s special talent. Gerry tended the golf-club bar in addition to a cleaning job at a local rugby club, and Rosie worked extra shifts at the 3M plant to amass the funds necessary to send Rory to tournaments and golf clinics in Europe and the US, an expense that would greatly increase after McIlroy decided at 15 that he would leave school to devote himself full-time to golf. But Gerry’s greatest contribution may have been the decision he made when Rory was seven to take a step back from his son’s golf education.
“I remember the day he did it,” Bannon told me. He brought Gerry and Rory to the back of the shop. “Rory was playing with a set of golf clubs that were far too long for him. They were up under his arms. I cut a big chunk off the top of them.” He put on new grips and then handed the clubs back. Gerry said: “That’s okay. I’m handing him over to you. That’s it. You look after him.”
“I think it was very smart of my dad,” Rory told me. “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.”
In the swing room at Bangor, Bannon showed me a recent video of McIlroy hitting balls out on the range just a few weeks earlier in Dubai, the 20lbs of muscle he has added in the past five years now apparent in his thighs and upper body. Since 2010, McIlroy has been working out five times a week, 90 minutes a day, under the close supervision of his trainer, Dr Stephen McGregor, a fitness consultant for Manchester City FC and formerly for the New York Knicks.
Bannon pointed to his computer screen and described how McIlroy’s body now has the ability to absorb the power he creates with his swing and maintain perfect balance. But he noted the pattern and essence of the swing had never really changed.
“The flow,” he said. “Or his personality, which comes out in the swing. It has a graceful flow. It’s still there. He doesn’t adjust that. I told his dad when Rory was quite young I’d try to create a swing that fit him, that suited that personality.”
When I asked McIlroy how he would characterise his personality, an initial hesitation seemed to indicate that he really doesn’t devote a lot of time to pondering such matters. Then he sat forward a bit.
“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,” he said. “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.” He continued: “My putting got very static and sort of technical, and I’d 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.”
McIlroy’s ascendance since turning pro in September 2007 at age 18 has been both swift and at times a bit streaky, marked by jaw-dropping, blow-away-the field victories and sudden, dizzying skids. And yet he has always been able to rebound from down stretches and regain that chest-protruding, quick-striding gait he gets when he’s really playing well. “His moxie,” as Jack Nicklaus characterised it. “He’s got a little swagger there,” Nicklaus said. “It’s a little bit cocky but not offensive.”
At the end of 2013, McIlroy sat down with Bannon; his caddie, Fitzgerald; and his trainer, McGregor, and they all decided he needed to, as McIlroy put it, “look back to move forward” and return to some semblance of his old routine.
“When I used to live at home in Northern Ireland,” he told me, “I’d get home on a week off between tournaments, and I’d see Michael maybe three mornings a week. That was the work I was doing, and all of a sudden I didn’t have that anymore, and we needed to find some sort of way to incorporate that back into my life.”
McIlroy said he actually had to plead with Bannon, who was reluctant to spend too much time away from his wife and kids, to join him, Fitzgerald and McGregor on tour. “Michael,” he told him. “I’m the world No. 1. What else do I have to do?”
Last spring, with Bannon along on tour, McIlroy took the BMW PGA championship in England, his first victory in 18 months. It came just days after he ended his three-year on-and-off-again relationship with tennis star Caroline Wozniacki, in what she described as a brief phone call just days after mailing invitations to a planned November wedding in New York.
He then went on to claim his first British Open, becoming only the seventh player to win that tournament leading wire to wire, and then managed to grind out a victory in the final round of the PGA Championship at Valhalla after being three strokes behind Rickie Fowler with only nine holes left to play. “Probably what I was most proud of last year was how I played that back nine at Valhalla,” he said. “It was a different way to win, and I proved to myself that I could do it.”
Northern Ireland has produced so many good golfers, and many will tell you about the ways in which hardscrabble links courses force a golfer to learn a greater resilience and variety of shots. But there is, too, in the steely resolve McIlroy often exhibits on the golf course, a deep-rooted link to the very Troubles from which he and the other so-called children of Clinton emerged largely unscathed. McIlroy had just turned 9 when the Good Friday Agreement that the Clinton administration helped to broker was approved. Driving around Belfast one afternoon last November, McIlroy’s uncle Brian headed into a predominantly Catholic section known as Holylands, a few blocks from Queens University, and came to a stop before a nearly 40-foot-high brightly coloured mural on the side of a set of two-story, working-class, brick rowhouses on Damascus Street: a portrait of Rory McIlroy at the apogee of that full-flourish swing.
“In years gone by, the sides of those houses would have been painted with sectarian murals and flags and all that sort of stuff,” McIlroy said. “So it’s very symbolic. My generation, we don’t care about any of that stuff.”
McIlroy met Bill Clinton for the first time in 2013 in Dublin. They played a round of golf. “Man loves a mulligan,” McIlroy said, then paused for effect: “No, I mean on every other shot. But, hey, he’s the president.” They had dinner that night. At one point he stood up and thanked Clinton for making his country a better place to grow up. “I think for me it has kept me very grounded,” he said. “I’ll never forget where I’m from.”
When I was in New York with McIlroy, we were driven in his limo to an fundraising event in Jersey City for the Rory Foundation, the charity McIlroy established for children’s causes. McIlroy sat in the far back doing an interview by mobile phone. His aide Sean O’Flaherty, opened his laptop to show a breakdown of Rory’s 2015 schedule: a swirl of golf, business and philanthropic commitments that leaves about 18 days a year to himself.
This week’s Masters is obviously paramount now in McIlroy’s mind. When I brought it up and the larger question of how many majors he hopes to win in his career, he spoke of the period back in 2012 just after he achieved his first No. 1 ranking.
“I struggled for a few months,” McIlroy recalled. “I was like: This was my goal. What do I do now?” He went on to talk about an early lesson his father taught him about not being content with success, having to always embark on the next journey and never stagnate. “I could sit here and say I want to win the Masters and US Open. Okay, that’s a goal. But for me the interesting thing is how do I achieve that. I have to get better at a 60-yard chip shot; I have to get better at turning the ball from right to left; or my fairway wood play has to get better. All the little things that add up to that ultimate outcome.”
Golf at his level, McIlroy told me, increasingly becomes about mind, emotion and course management. Look at 60 pro players on a driving range, he said, and it’s hard to tell them apart. Everyone hits the ball great, strikes it well. It’s the minute differences, good decisions, deciding when to be aggressive. “All those sorts of things,” as he put it, “that come with experience, knowing yourself, knowing your game.”
Bannon spoke in Northern Ireland about the way McIlroy closed out last year. He said it confirmed what he always felt about McIlroy and his game: that he has guts and determination and can be ruthless on the golf course.
“The way he came down the stretch at Valhalla,” Bannon said, “you can see he’s not afraid of much. I can’t say the others fell apart. He conquered them.”
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