He did it. Finally, gloriously and oh, so dramatically. Rory McIlroy won the Masters. The longest day ended with a putt so short you didn’t even have to watch. Which was good, because by then plenty couldn’t bear to. Just close your eyes and wait for the roar.
Open them now. See him there, face down on Augusta’s 18th green, heaving and sobbing after everything. After 11 years, after 40 majors since his USPGA at Valhalla on August 10th, 2014, he straightened out the weirdest glitch in golf. He was always too good not to add to his major total but now he has added the one he wanted more than anything.
This was more than turning four into five, though. It was more even than the career Grand Slam. In the small, sequestered world of golf, joining the five other gods of the game is a huge deal but out in the world, it’s a pretty meaningless construct. Tell somebody at work today that Rory McIlroy is on a par with Gene Sarazen now and watch them back slowly away.
But ask them did they see the golf last night and they’ll know immediately what you’re talking about. McIlroy has done so much winning over the past decade that it has always felt deeply unfair that he became a byword for losing. This was the 44th tournament win of his career, the 35th since his last major. And yet he had become famous for getting beaten when it really mattered.
That could have happened here too. So, so easily. He won the Masters, yes. But in the most Rory McIlroy way possible.
In the history of Augusta, only one person has won a green jacket in a week where they finished with three double bogeys across the week. Hilariously, that someone isn’t McIlroy, who ran up four – including two in the final round alone. What? Did you expect it to be simple?
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This is the thing with McIlroy. 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.
All of it was there on Sunday. Has one round of golf ever summed up a person’s nature so perfectly? McIlroy’s driving is his superpower yet he hit just five fairways over the course of the day, including the 18th twice. His putting stats are top-10 on the PGA tour this year yet he missed five putts inside 11 feet in the last six holes. So he drove terribly and putted like he was holding a garden rake and still he won the Masters. How?
By hitting some of the best shots of his life, is how. By sizing up the trouble he’d gotten himself into pressing the big red button and still knowing how to get through the door. Most major winners get to take away one shot that becomes the signature moment, the one they play in all the montages. McIlroy hit one on the seventh, the 10th, the 15th, the 17th and in the play-off. And every last one of them was needed. No wonder he collapsed at the end.
Butch Harmon said something on Sky afterwards that kind of clanged in the moment: “This whole day is a tribute to why we love the game of golf.” Well-meaning as it was, it felt altogether too small. This wasn’t about golf, really at all. It was about life.
“My battle today was with myself,” McIlroy said in his press conference. 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.
That’s what kept the country up half the night. Not the Masters, not the career Grand Slam, none of that really. It was more the sheer human terror of a fight with the big red button. Rory McIlroy pressed it – repeatedly – and still got out the door. That’s the attraction. That’s what the knotted knickers are about.
Because in the end, and without getting too overwrought about this, what gives life meaning? It’s all the trial and error. It’s making yourself vulnerable. It’s being who you are, with all the good and all the bad that comes attached. And then, when it’s over, collapsing into the arms of your best friend and going off to kiss your wife and your kid.
He did it. Rory McIlroy did it. What a horrific, excruciating pleasure it was to watch him as he went.
