Rory McIlroy looking for another mountain to climb

“If I can’t get motivated to get up for an Open Championship at home, then I don’t know what can motivate me?" McIlroy said after his fourth round 67 at the US Open. 

By going 74-72-74 over the first three days at the US Open, Rory McIlroy racked up his worst run of scoring at a major championship for 13 years. Pic: Cliff Hawkins/Getty Images

Back to regularly answering questions, Rory McIlroy even asked a couple of his own. One could be the most telling of his week at the US Open — and whatever comes next.

Sunday at Oakmont had gone well, really well. But it also hadn’t gone according to plan. For the second-straight deciding day of a major championship, McIlroy’s tournament was over before the final-round leaders had even swung a club of consequence.

McIlroy did his damnedest to take something away from a week that had mostly been about addition, the 36-year-old’s actions on and off the course adding more evidence to a puzzling pile. The year’s third major had served up further vignettes of a man struggling mightily to adjust to his post-Masters reality.

‘What’s eating Rory?’ was the searching question, answers fiendishly hard to find in the treacle thick rough of western Pennsylvania. His snappy Saturday night return to media duties — six-straight rounds skipping the microphones stretching all the way back to last month at the PGA Championship — had sparked further concern at Oakmont.

“I don’t like to see it,” Paul McGinley said afterwards. “I’m disappointed for Rory that it’s come to that. Something is eating at him. He hasn’t let us know what it is, but there’s something that’s not right.” On Sunday McIlroy did his best to show the world that not everything was wrong, firing a really impressive closing 67 which featured six birdies and pushed him into the top 30 with plenty of golf still to be played.

Afterwards, he again spoke to a huddle of reporters near the Oakmont clubhouse, answering eight questions. Five of them cast his mind forward to next month’s Open Championship in Portrush. McIlroy engaged in much more detail than he had the previous evening and said he was hopeful that coming back to the northern coastline as a Masters champion, with adoring and expectant galleries of home, could provide all of the motivation in the world. Which is exactly what's been missing these past two months.

“I climbed my Everest in April, and I think after you do something like that, you’ve got to make your way back down,” said McIlroy. “You’ve got to look for another mountain to climb. An Open at Portrush is certainly one of those.” Then he appeared to turn one query on himself.

“If I can’t get motivated to get up for an Open Championship at home, then I don’t know what can motivate me? I just need to get myself in the right frame of mind. I probably haven’t been there the last few weeks.” 

Sunday’s 67 stopped the rot in numerous ways. By going 74-72-74 over the first three days he’d racked up his worst run of scoring at a major championship for 13 years. At Quail Hollow last month he’d never been in contention either, that week instead proving mostly contentious, his vow of silence sparked by how a story about his driver failing compliance testing had been reported.

Before packing up the laptop to leave North Carolina last month we wrote the following: “What a peculiar next act this has mushroomed into for McIlroy, particularly following on from a month of almost universal adulation.” Another month has now passed. Sunday marked nine weeks since his glorious green jacket coronation at Augusta. Peculiarities piled up since. Even amid his stellar scoring at Oakmont on Sunday there was another instantly viral moment of a man browned off with many things.

An errant iron frustrated him and he briefly looked ready to tomahawk the club down the fairway, something he’d done on Friday when he also smashed a tee box in anger. Instead on Sunday he threw the club at his bag but saw it boomerang right back for him to catch in his other hand. The dexterity of a major champion and all that.

The club which hadn’t felt right in his hands recently was the driver. Sunday was another big step back in the right direction on that front. “Really encouraged,” he said, the stats showing that he led the entire field in strokes gained from the tee box. “Physically, I feel like my game's there. It's just mentally getting myself in the right frame of mind to get the best out of myself.” The body can often tell plenty about McIlroy. He’s never been one you’d think would excel at a poker table. His post-Augusta issues centre on something we, and apparently, he, cannot see. The fog of Rors, an imperceptible hazy state that he’s found himself in having achieved all he ever wanted and returned to face weeks and weeks of questions about what’s next?

“This is not normal, when (McIlroy) does that,” McGinley had added in the wake of Saturday's awkwardness. "Because people look up to him, a press conference like that with his body language and short language doesn’t serve him right.” The actual language he used Sunday shouldn’t go unnoticed either. Everest may be a widely reached-for analogy. But one of the golfers who referenced it most memorably was Michael Campbell. The Kiwi, who won the 2005 US Open and struggled to refocus, recounted how he’d found himself in a car with prolific Olympic champion Steve Redgrave. “When Campbell asked what he could do after scaling Everest, Redgrave told him to do it again with no oxygen,” according to the NZ Post. Instead Campbell retired from golf prematurely.

McIlroy is clearly hopeful that home will focus his mind. As the leaders headed out Sunday, he spoke of his excitement at “just getting back to Europe in general”. He’s building a home near London and strikes you as someone ready to leave America where it is for a while: “We've got a lot to look forward to, got our new house in London, play the Scottish and then obviously The Open at Portrush.” His last homecoming there didn’t go according to plan either, a missed cut in 2016 one of his most harrowing.

“I remember I hit a shot into 12 or 13 Friday night trying to make the cut,” he said. “I remember the roar I got when the ball hit the green, and I felt like I was about to burst into tears. Just that support and that love from your own people. I need to just get myself in the right frame of mind to feel those feelings again.”