John Fogarty: Grudge golf suits you, Rory. So set out a mean stall this week at Augusta

WALKING TALL: Rory McIlroy gets his Masters challenge underway at 3.42pm Irish time on Thursday.

Dear Rory, 

This is how bad it’s got. Advice from a stranger, albeit one with good intentions who follows your game closely.

You play best when you have a chip on your shoulder. If you don’t know that by now, you will never know. The last Major you won, you were spitting feathers. Rickie Fowler and Phil Mickelson playing ahead of you on the final day in Valhalla in 2014, giving it big ‘un with their fist-pumps. It felt, you felt like they were doing it for your benefit.

Mickelson at least seemed miffed by you rushing to finish by sundown. If anything, he and Fowler, who you sensed were in cahoots, were taking their sweet time knowing how quick you like to play your golf.

“I was on a mission,” you later said. “(What Fowler and Mickelson did) sort of annoyed me. So I had this thing in my head, ‘I’m going to catch you and I’m going to beat you.’” And you did. With great vengeance and a furious anger. And you were just as riled in Rome last September when Joe LaCava did what he did. Jim “Bones” McKay felt the brunt of it but ultimately Sam Burns suffered the wrath of your controlled aggression the following day.

Sure, Augusta carries baggage for you but it does for most. It took Mickelson 12 tries to win one. And you don’t need to be told what’s gone wrong and right for you there. In your last nine visits, you’ve scored an average 72.33 on day one. In your last nine day four rounds, it’s 68.78. And you sure as hell don’t need to be reminded it’s six years since you last started a Masters with a round in the 60s (68).

Many will say your superior finishes in Majors come when the win’s out of reach, the pressure is off and you’re freewheeling. That’s not always the case. That 64 to finish second to Scottie Scheffler two years ago was an attempt at victory when you sensed you had been written off. It’s a feeling you should bottle.

You didn’t have it in St Andrew’s later that year and that was the problem. Leading by three, you believed playing within yourself on the back nine would be enough to win. Jeez, everyone wanted that Claret Jug for you. You felt the love pouring from the other sides of the ropes when what you needed were dissenters.

You are getting better at blocking out the distractions, though. Good move to step down from the PGA Tour’s policy board. It wasn’t just the smart move: if you had stayed on, you’d have looked like a chump. As you said yourself, you felt like “a sacrificial lamb” in the PGA Tour-LIV battle.

That tunnel vision approach must be applied this week. Don’t give a live interview walking up the ninth fairway like you did in your first round last year. You insisted the earpiece and Jim Nantz and Trevor Immelman on CBS didn’t affect you but you were eight shots off the lead at the time.

Would Brooks Koepka have agreed to do such a thing? He mightn’t have overtaken your Major haul that week but, as you pointed out in the Netflix documentary, he did at the USPGA the following month. On Major weeks, Koepka’s behaviour is civil at best, curt most of the time. It mightn’t be mere coincidence that they comprise over half of his nine PGA Tour titles.

If what you said last June still holds true and you hate LIV Golf, there are enough examples of it like Koepka to grind your gears this week. Twelve months before that, you noted how happy you were to eclipse Greg Norman’s 20 PGA Tour titles. Wouldn’t going one better than the LIV figurehead on a course that haunted him to the point that it defined his career be a sweet prize?

So, set out a mean stall this week. Instead of walking out of Augusta in a huff having played “dog shit” golf, refusing to speak to the media and pulling out of the RBC Heritage the following week, don’t be as obliging before you play. By all means, talk but make it perfunctory. And smile but don’t make it a shit-eating one. 

Recently, Curtis Strange advised you to take a leaf out of Ben Hogan’s book and “look at the grass all week long”. That’s wisdom. And if Marcus Aurelius was your inspiration in Rome, another local Bobby Jones can be this time in Augusta: “The object of golf is to beat someone. Make sure that someone is not yourself.” 

If that means playing “boring golf”, make it fierce boring. You know it’s the par 4s that have killed you. You’re four over for your last eight plays of the 11th hole. Play for par like you’re sticking two fingers up to those who say course management is not in your wheelhouse.

Fuel yourself on the begrudgery. It’s not difficult to find an angle. Ten years after your last Major in this your 16th Masters, you won’t be short of takes, many of which will be hot.

Just make sure when this morning comes around, you wake up angry. You’re a nice guy, Rory – too nice for your own good at times.

Grudge golf suits you.