The year of Rory proved the purest joy is in the unknown journey

The past 12 months with Rory McIlroy was all about taking us to unexpected, sometimes uncomfortable, often unforgettable places.

YEAR OF RORY: Rory McIlroy celebrates with the fans during the Sunday singles matches of the 2025 Ryder Cup. Pic: Richard Heathcote/Getty Images.

When Rory met Rory. That was a little gem of a moment you didn’t see on any of the end-of-year McIlroy montages. To be fair to every editor on the planet who’s been tasked with putting one together, an awful lot of good stuff got left on the cutting room floor. What a bloody year.

But Rory and Rory. That was worth getting up at five on a Wednesday morning and traipsing a full 90 minutes north of Toronto to see. McIlroy was on the first hole of Pro Am day at the RBC Canadian Open, making his return to the game after a break away. Greeting him on the tee box as the sun began its morning pour was a tottering two-year-old, bedecked in a two-year-old-sized Green Jacket.

“I have one of those too,” McIlroy smiled. “It took me a little longer to get mine!” 

McIlroy boomed one down the fairway and the galleries were off with him. I cut across behind and bobbed and weaved through the crowds to see where the little fella had got to. Near the green I caught up with the family, identified myself as a journalist and asked if I could get the toddler’s name.

“Rory, like Rory,” his Meath-born father John McNerney informed. They’d got the Green Jacket on Amazon. A lot easier secured than the other fella's.

The crowds drifted on to the second but, content that I’d snared a nice bit of colour, I ducked back and tucked up the completely deserted 10th hole. I had business to attend to. It was almost lunchtime back home and I had at least four more loved ones I wanted to call to tell them I had been diagnosed with cancer.

If you presumed this was one last nice look back at McIlroy’s 2025 with maybe a wee glance towards 2026 and are wondering why you’re suddenly knee-deep in first-person cancer content, let me assure you, I’m as surprised as the rest of ye. But this, ultimately, is what the past 12 months with Rory McIlroy was all about, no? Taking us to unexpected, sometimes uncomfortable, often unforgettable places. Most of all making us feel something. The crying lump collapsed into the 18th green at Augusta. The finger pointing, f***-you-right-back Ryder Cup leader. The world watched and felt and then thought about other feelings.

Last week, when McIlroy put the final bow on his year for all ages by adding RTÉ's to the BBC Sportsperson of the Year awards, Irish Times writer Malachy Clerkin penned a lovely piece under the headline ‘Rory McIlroy is special because of his vulnerabilities as much as his victories’. Spot on. You can go one further too: those vulnerabilities encourage vulnerability.

There are a lot of partners and spouses up and down the land who saw their significant other shed a tear on less than a handful of occasions in 2025. But how they flowed in the late hours of Masters Sunday. And now here I am talking scans and skin grafts in what's supposed to be a season-ender.

This was a year of Rory that proved the real grip and the purest joy is in the unknown journey. Unknowable, unscriptable, unchartable. The uniquely him rollercoaster of maniac tendencies wrapped up in a raw, bare-naked emotion that sits right on the surface level should be accepted now. Just roll with it.

Because, of all the things McIlroy won and earned in 2025, he’s surely earned a break from being pressed on what’s next? For far too much of the year ‘Any goals, Rory?’ became the ‘Any knocks?’ of the PGA press tent.

Rory McIlroy gave everything. #themasters pic.twitter.com/Iv38QeVTbm

— The Masters (@TheMasters) April 13, 2025

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Sellers Shy is the name of the CBS Golf lead producer who decided to stick with what may be the definitive shot of not just McIlroy’s 2025 but the whole damn thing. The uninterrupted five minutes and seven seconds following him through the throngs at Augusta, 11 years and maybe 36 years of everything all rushing out at once, was as good as sports TV gets. Did Shy go back into the office on Monday morning to be met with “Nice job Sellers. So what are your goals for the rest of your life now?” 

It’s a personal peculiarity that the McIlroy year was interwoven through my cancer journey. The awful interregnum between biopsy and diagnosis of melanoma was spent in North Carolina, desperate for distraction but instead being given the silent treatment by McIlroy at the PGA Championship; the week I decided to break the news to friends and family was spent with him at the RBC Canadian Open; a blessedly early surgery slot opening up meant I had to scrap travel plans to Oakmont for the US Open; my trip home two months later to celebrate getting a Stage 2A result and the all-clear was the week he provided Irish sport with one of the great explosions of noise on the 72nd hole at the K Club; my first week back to work after three torturous months off was at Bethpage, when McIlroy, alongside Shane Lowry, showed a depth of strength and stones to silence the American simpletons. A life-affirming week in myriad ways.

Through it all, what does cancer teach you? Throw that on the list of questions for another day. Too weighty for festive season and I’m nowhere close to reckoning deeply enough to have the answers. No experience with it is identical to another. I was absolutely blessed that the best possible outcomes came my way — and in short order. In between were bastarding times because it’s a bastarding thing. You doubt your own body in a way that feels deeply unfair. Every pinch in a shoulder nerve, a back pain or a little twitch in the eyelid. Is that it, spreading through you as you try to keep up appearances? You wonder how in Christ's name God gave you nothing in the looks department apart from sexy Sligo calves and is now coming back to take one away. You learn how fragile plans and goals and resolutions really are. You’re reminded that clichés may indeed be clichés but they’re also true. Family and friends are a blessing, a magical thing. Doctors and nurses are a step above again. You’re also reminded that sport remains life’s great soul-fulfilling distraction.

So Rory, then, and all those vulnerabilities. He’ll sure as shit take them all into 2026 with him. And, rightly, he’ll be loved for that. There’ll be a defence of his Players crown and then the return to Augusta. The US Open at Shinnecock and an Open at Birkdale both feel tantalising. In the high moments and the low, he’ll lay himself out there, wide open and raw as ever. Because we’re blessed that, mostly, he knows no other way.

Ultimately, that’s why there’s no need for the ‘give us a goal Rory…set yourself a 2026 target for us there will ya?’ stuff. What’s next? Hopefully, almost certainly, more of the same. And if we’re all blessed to stay healthy, we’ll find out soon enough anyway.