One of the many wonders is this: Rory McIlroy won the Masters by messing up in ways that had damned him so many times before; by missing short putts, by running up big numbers, by finding trouble off the tee, by letting a lead slip; by cracking.
All the causes of his failures in the Majors for the last 11 years walked with him on Sunday, like ghosts at the banquet.
He won not because his game had changed, or not because his weaknesses had suddenly been erased, or not because his personality had been altered for one day only, but because he found a way to cope with the self-sabotage and the raging doubts. They didn’t leave him; he accepted them.
Throughout his career, the fault lines in McIlroy’s mentality have always carried the threat of earthquakes. On Sunday, the ground shifted violently under his feet again. He lost his balance, he got up; fell again, up again.
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“It’s such a battle in your head of trying to stay in the present moment and hit this next shot good and hit the next shot good,” he said in the press conference afterwards.
“You know, that was the battle today. My battle today was with myself. It wasn’t with anyone else. You know, at the end there, it was with Justin [Rose], but my battle today was with my mind and staying in the present.”
In McIlroy’s career, managing his mind at the Majors has been the great recurring theme and the overwhelming challenge. For a long time, he was in denial. When his putting wasn’t good enough under pressure – as it often wasn’t over the years – he went in search of help: Paul Hurrion first, Brad Faxon now.
In other years, leading up to the Masters, he turned to Pete Cowen and Butch Harmon, desperately searching for something that might make a difference. In both cases, it was a short-term arrangement and an impermanent fix.
But in trying to manage his mind he seemed to believe for a long time that the solutions were within, and he didn’t need anybody to help him look. When he suffered a meltdown at the 2013 Open, he was asked if would consider seeing someone and he confirmed years later that he had seen a sports psychologist around that time, but he didn’t give his name, and it was only one session.
He said he worked with Bob Rotella for a couple of months in 2010 and he said in 2011 that he had read all of Rotella’s books. But, for the next 10 years, at the height of his torment in the Majors, their professional relationship was no more than casual.
That changed in 2021. McIlroy’s record in the Majors that year was Cut, tied 7th, tied 46th and tied 49th, his worst ever season at the events that matter most.
Over the last three years, though, his failures had been better: three runner-up finishes, a third-place finish, three other top 10s, and just two blowouts. The greatest difference in McIlroy was that he was better at hanging tough and giving himself a chance.
In the men’s and women’s game, Rotella reckons that his clients have won more than 300 tournaments. When Pádraig Harrington made his Major breakthrough at Carnoustie in 2007, Rotella stayed in the house with him all that week. Harrington swore by him.
McIlroy was much slower to make that commitment, not just to Rotella, but to the idea that his mind could be coached in that way. Looking back now, it cost him valuable time.
At Augusta, questions about his mentality were an annual feature of his pre-tournament press conferences. He would have known what was coming. The questions would be peppered with triggering phrases such as “scar tissue” and “mental and emotional toll”, or euphemisms such as “struggles” or “challenges”.
One question a couple of years ago bundled them all together: “When you think about your struggles over the years, do you categorise them as physical, mental or emotional struggles?”
Physical was thrown in as a make weight. “I would say the majority are mental or emotional struggles rather than physical,” McIlroy said. “I’ve always felt I had the physical ability to win this tournament.”
On Sunday, that was the defining battle: between the physical and the emotional. He had the shots; he always had the shots. His 9 iron out of the trees on the seventh, the whiplash 7 iron on to the 15th green, the full-bore 8 iron on to the second last green, were three of the greatest shots he has ever hit under pressure.
But in the press conference he tried to explain his destructive approach to the 13th green in technical terms, when, in reality, it was a mental error.
“It had gone into a little valley and it was on the upslope. And usually when I hit a wedge shot off upslopes, they come out a little bit left on me. I gave myself like a couple of yards of room to the right. I wasn’t aiming at the creek, but it came out, you know, a little weak and a little right.”
“I wanted to cry for him,” Bryson DeChambeau said afterwards. “I mean, as a professional, you just know to hit it in the middle of the green.” The same as the rest of us, DeChambeau thought that McIlroy had cracked again. That thought would have barged into McIlroy’s mind too. Mental strength is not about eliminating doubt; it is about finding an accommodation.
“You know, there was points on the back nine today, I thought, you know, ‘Have I let this slip again?‘” The most compelling thing about McIlroy has always been his vulnerability. Rotella wasn’t trying to change that either.
“It’s about getting people to learn how to get out of their own way so they can do something they know how to do,” Rotella said recently. “It doesn’t take much to get in your own way. I talk a lot about getting people to have an instant amnesia of their mistakes, but a long-term memory of their good shots.”
Is that what McIlroy did on Sunday? “I’d like to say that I did a better job of it than I did,” he said. “It was a struggle, but I got it over the line.”
In winning, at Augusta he broke all the rules. Since 2005 only Tiger Woods had won the Masters without being in the top 10 after the first round. For the 85th Masters, the winning scorecard of every previous champion was rounded up to averages: on average, the winner had no double-bogey for the week. The last three winners have had one each. McIlroy had four. Staggering.
At the beginning of his winner’s press conference the moderator asked for the first question. McIlroy jumped in.
“I have a question,” he said. “What are we going to talk about next year?”
No further questions.
