The country was up half the night last weekend as Rory McIlroy won the Masters and our live coverage of the final day in this remarkable story was the most read by Irish Times subscribers last week.
The win sees him join an exclusive club of players who can claim a career Grand Slam; he has become the sixth member and the first since Tiger Woods, who achieved the same feat a generation ago in 2000.
McIlroy is a hugely compelling sporting figure.
As Malachy Clerkin wrote the morning after his Masters win, McIlroy won in the “most Rory McIlroy way possible” as he surrendered a late lead and had to win a play-off.
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“This is the thing with McIlroy,” writes Clerkin. “It’s always been the thing. Occasionally, you hear people wonder what the attraction is, why exactly we get our knickers in a collective knot considering he fails so often. But it’s precisely that, the fact that he seems somehow immune to the straightforward, impervious to the uncomplicated.”
“McIlroy is the kid in the room with the sign on the door at one end saying, ‘Sweets Through Here’ and a big red button saying, ‘Do Not Press This Big Red Button’ at the other. Something in his make-up has always made him understand that he will probably end up with the sweets anyway and so he presses the big red button to see what will happen. You can’t not watch that.”
As Clerkin notes, McIlroy has done so much winning over the past decade that it has always felt deeply unfair that he became a byword for losing.
One of the reasons McIlroy is compelling is because he is candid and in the breathless moments after his win he gave an insight into the pressures of striving and coming up just short, repeatedly.
“My battle today was with myself,” McIlroy said in his press conference. For Clerkin, “that’s it in a nutshell. If the whole thing was a tribute to anything, it was to the very human impulse to live in your own head. To try and fail.
“To understand that you will make a mess of things but if you keep going, if you enmesh yourself in something and empty who you are into it, it might eventually come right. Not that it will, just that it might.”
As his career has progressed McIlroy has surrounded himself with a remarkable team. This includes his caddie, Harry Diamond; his manager, Seán O’Flaherty; his coach, Michael Bannon; his putting coach, Brad Faxon; his sports psychologist, Dr Bob Rotella.
The multi-million euro money side of the brand is managed by Rory McIlroy Inc (Rory McIlroy Management Services Ltd) which has a five-man board of directors which includes McIlroy and O’Flaherty, along with his father, Gerry, and equity investors Neil Hughes and Peter Crowley.
Fittingly, the first person to get a bear hug from McIlroy was caddie Harry Diamond. More than a bagman, his best friend too. Diamond, a former Irish amateur international and who, like McIlroy, is a past winner of the West of Ireland amateur championship, started caddying for the new Masters champion back in 2017 and has been by his side since.
Much attention has been given to the influence of sports psychologist Rotella – who worked with Faxon in his playing days and has been a longtime mind guru to Pádraig Harrington among others – brings the power of positive thinking McIlroy’s way. It was Rotella who helped McIlroy live with the raging doubts and secure a career Grand Slam.
Before the Masters, McIlroy observed: “I first met Bob back in 2010, so I’ve known him for quite a while, 15 years, and we’ve always chatted”.
“[We’re] talking about not getting too much into results and outcomes, we talk about trying to chase a feeling on the golf course. Like if you’re on the golf course, what way do you want to feel when you’re playing golf? That’s something I do every week that I compete. If I can chase that feeling and make that the important thing, then hopefully the golf will take care of itself.”
For a while at Augusta last week, it didn’t. On Thursday McIlroy cut a despondent figure walking off the 18th green. That is when Rotella got to work, focusing on the positives.
The tide turned back McIlroy’s way and that momentum would carry him on – albeit on a roller-coaster final day – to victory.
A win like this - in any field - can also be literally life changing, according to neuropsychologist Ian Robertson.
“Winning an Oscar increases your lifespan by five years, compared to being nominated. We don’t have enough data to say whether this is true also of winning the Grand Slam in golf.
“But it seems plausible that the 35-year-old golfing legend will benefit from a life-enhancing release from competitive stress that will probably last for the rest of his days,” writes Robertson.
“When we feel stressed, our bodies releases a hormone called cortisol, which energises us in the short term, but is corrosive of the cells in our body when sustained at high levels over long periods.
“We are a competitive species and every day entails multiple mini-tournaments – the put-down smirk, the Facebook boast, the failed promotion, the nerve-racking presentation, and so on.
“There are, however, certain rare accolades that are so prestigious they magically lift a person above the fray of these multiple life frictions. Suddenly, you are no longer just as good as your last movie . . . it is like an amazing vaccine against negative evaluation by others.”
That was what was so compelling about last weekend. It was nothing to do with golf, really. It was about a person striving with all their might to finally reach a cherished goal. It was about life.
Five key reads
- “You don’t have to be Dr Freud, or even Dr Ruth, to recognise this psychosexual dimension to Trump’s attempt to upend the entire regime of international trade.” That’s according to Fintan O’Toole, who this week explored some of the motives behind the US president’s “great tariff debacle”, which sent stock and bond markets into a spin.
- One piece gaining good reader attention this week was Daniel McLaughlin’s story of one man who arrived in Ireland in the mid-1960s as Austrian citizen Karl-Bernd Motl. He seemed to take quickly to Dublin life, renting a room, setting up as a travelling salesman, playing chess at a local club and starting classes in Irish. “But Motl was in fact Yuri Linov, a Soviet spy trained by the KGB…”
- Earlier this week, Sinn Féin regained its position as the most popular party in the Republic, while voters showed little enthusiasm for the Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael-Independent Coalition. In the first Irish Times/Ipsos B&A opinion poll since the Coalition took office, Sinn Féin saw its support jump. For Fine Gael, as Pat Leahy wrote in his analysis, it was a “shocker”: “You’d have to go back to 1994 for the last time Fine Gael returned such a low poll rating in The Irish Times series.”
- Is Blackrock having its Barcelona moment? Corinna Hardgrave’s latest restaurant review saw her dine in Sea Shanty; the experience was “pleasurably satisfying”, and earned the spot a four-star review.
- In a surprise announcement this week, New Zealand star Rieko Ioane confirmed he has agreed a seven-month contract with Leinster, reopening the debate about the funding of Ireland’s four professional sides. “Ioane’s signing is sure to cause a meltdown among some supporters of Munster, Ulster and Connacht,” wrote John O’Sullivan in his analysis. “The IRFU has sanctioned the deal so it’s likely that most of the flak will be heading their way.”
In this week’s On the Money newsletter, Joanne Hunt is talking about the deposit return scheme, and asking: are you getting the best deal when returning your bottles and cans? Sign up here to receive the newsletter straight to your inbox every Friday.
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