Rory Mcilroy almost sewed away the champions in three different stretches on Sunday alone.
Still, I think of the other shot at PAR-5 15, and I can’t access the part of my brain that distributes snark.
“He didn’t even do Eagle Putt as the shot set up!” You can crack. “He was still blowing almost!”
Sure. Cool. The second shot at No. 15 did not win him the champions, but it absolutely pulled him out of a tail and allowed him to stop giving away the champions.
And with the fifth major victory – who completed his career Grand Slam and cut a week when he shortened four double bogeys, two on Thursday and two on Sunday – Mcilroy took away doubt that he is the biggest golf player we have seen since Tiger Woods. Rubbing and complicated and human as he is, Mcilroy belongs to the Pantheon of greatest golfers of all time.
We want our sports stars to be tough. Coming back from “adversities”, when we notice its many forms, is something we consider to be important for our stories. Woods himself was a golf machine in the early 2000s and became much less robotic, much more equivalent, when he recovered from a series of injuries and personal mistakes to win tournaments again in the late 2010s.
Think of the failures that Mcilroy has had to endure and the ridicule he has received from a pocket with Golfans. An almost 11-year-old big championship dryer. Blowing Sunday leaders at the US 2023 and 2024 open – the latter to Bryson Duchambeau, a face of Liv Golf and his game partner again on Sunday. Mcilroy lost fans throughout PGA-life melodrama, and for a while also affected the civil war Hans Golf.
To open the last round of the masters with a double bogey-to immediately hand over your two-shot pillow on the decelambeau-ficked a “here we go again” from his followers and opponents. But with information about the obvious also made it for mandatory TV: much better to watch a potential train crash than a leap.
He slandered back in the lead just to make a bogey on No. 11, another double on No. 13 and a bogey on No. 14. He officially lost the lead and released one behind Justin Rose and Ludvig Åberg. And with the burden of everything mentioned above, we were in spiral position.
At the closing leg of Amen Corner, Mcilroy went to his ball under a low -hanging tree branch and hit a powerful move that curled right to the left around the tree, carried the water and hit the green and rolled to 6 meters from the cup, where he spit for Birdie.
The next shot of his life – he had three or four of the Sunday afternoon – was his perfect approach on No. 17 which sat 2 meters away and put the bird that put him back in the solo line.
Of course, he did not make it easy on himself, lacked a 5-foot couple to win the green jacket in the regulation-day’s third “choke”. He gave his friend Rose a chance in a playoffs, and after Rose hit his attitude to 15 feet, Mcilroy spun his back to just 4.
“One of the strangest rounds I’ve ever seen,” CBS supplementary Jim Nantz said right now.
For each back-breaking mistake, Mcilroy had an answer.
Since this was how McIlroy finally won the champions – several big mistakes, drama called up to 11 – there are still about 30 lives on Twitter that will mock him. But I would argue to pull away your bad holes and move on to the next is what golf is all about, whether you are dining it around the county course or compete on a major.
I think that is what is so attractive about what Mcilroy achieved Sunday, and why so many agreed to look at what will go down as one of the best champions of all time.
Sam Snead, Arnold Palmer, Tom Watson and Phil Mickelson came briefly on a career sludge. The list is Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods – and Rory Mcilroy.
