AUGUSTA — Rory McIlroy tried something different this year: A first-round collapse to lose the Masters.
McIlroy was 4 under through 14 holes and even par at the end, and while he is only four strokes behind the trio in second place, I don’t believe for a second that McIlroy can win this. I don’t even think McIlroy believes it. As he left the 18th green and walked across the 1st hole on his way to the clubhouse, he exhaled like a man who had just authored a disaster.
McIlroy signed his scorecard for an even-par 72, walked out, and exited stage right—blowing off the media in the process.
When McIlroy is striping his driver, he plays golf at a level very few players can reach. He had that kind of driving day Thursday. For 14-and-a-half holes, he looked like the best golfer in the world. Then he looked like Rory McIlroy at the Masters.
On the par-5 15th, he hit an excellent drive to the right side of the fairway, which is exactly where you want to be. He landed his approach pin-high, but it bounced forward and rolled off the green. That left him with perhaps the most famously fraught chip at Augusta National: uphill, then downhill, with a pond beyond the pin.
The only thing that can keep that chip out of the water is the golfer.
McIlroy chipped onto the green, past the pin and into the water.
It was a mistake he simply cannot make. McIlroy had to know from the way his approach bounced that by this late in the day, the green was extremely firm. The play there is a soft chip to the front edge, or even, better, a putt—anything to keep the ball dry. When you’re back there, you play for a 5 and move on.
McIlroy dropped on the other side of the pond, flighted a wedge to the far fringe, and two-putted for a 7.
Then, on 17, he re-enacted it: drive to the right, approach over the green, chip past the pin. This chip was even worse than the one on 15, but it should not have been as calamitous, because the green is not as sloped and there is no pond. It was even more calamitous: He slipped his par putt four feet past the hole, missed the comebacker, and he had his second double bogey in an hour.
I don’t care how you feel about McIlroy or how much money he has: This was hard to watch. But it was not surprising.
At this point, Augusta National is so far inside McIlroy’s head that when he closes his eyes, all he sees is pimento cheese.
On Tuesday, McIlroy said, “I need to treat this tournament like all the other tournaments that I play throughout the year. Look, I understand the narrative and the noise, and there’s a lot of anticipation and buildup coming into this tournament each and every year, but I just have to keep my head down and focus on my job.”
There are two problems with that. One is that McIlroy is far too self-aware to fall for that mind trick. He knows how badly he wants a green jacket to complete the career Grand Slam. He needs to learn to manage that desire, not deny it, when he is on the course. Otherwise, when something bad happens, as it inevitably will, that desire sneaks up from behind and decks him.
Maybe the chip on 15 was just a simple mistake. But that three-putt on 17 had “I should have won this thing in 2011 but I fell apart and everything since has been a nightmare” written all over it.
The other problem with the “just another tournament” approach is strategic: You cannot play Augusta National like any other course.
McIlroy likes to play freely: Pipe his drives, shoot low scores, ride his incredible array of skills to the sunset. That does not work here. You have to know where you can miss, and when you miss in the wrong place, you have to recognize it and adjust accordingly. As one of his playing partners, Akshay Bhatia, said Thursday, “You can be five feet away above the hole and you’re playing so defensive … when the greens get crunchy like they did today, you’re just kind of hitting and praying, honestly.”
Play for a 65 here and you’ll never shoot it. Respect the course and you have a chance.
“The funny thing about Augusta,” Jason Day said Thursday, “is it’s very, very easy to psyche yourself out. You have to acknowledge it is going to be tough.”
McIlroy has been psyching himself out here for years. If that sounds harsh, consider this:
He has been ranked in the top three in the world for 137 consecutive weeks, and in the top 10 in the world for the vast majority of his career. Yet the last time McIlroy shot the low score in his group when he still had a realistic chance to win the Masters was the third round of the 2018 tournament.
McIlroy shot a 65 that day. His playing partner Henrik Stenson shot a 70.
That evening, McIlroy tried to tighten the collar of third-round leader Patrick Reed.
“Patrick has got a three‑shot lead. I feel like all the pressure is on him. He’s got to go out and protect that, and he’s got a few guys chasing him that are pretty big‑time players. He’s got that to deal with and sleep on tonight … I feel like I can go out there and play like I’ve got nothing to lose. If I can do that, I feel like I’ll be okay.”
The next day, McIlroy shot a 74, easily the worst score of anybody in contention. This might sound like sportswriter psychobabble, and maybe it is, but I really believe McIlroy started to eliminate himself from that tournament with his comments about Reed on Saturday night.
To that point, McIlroy and Reed actually had a pretty good personal relationship. (This was many years and even more lawyers ago.) But everybody knew Reed takes things extremely personally and was much more comfortable in tension-filled situations than McIlroy. With his pressure comments, McIlroy killed any chance of the kind of friendly shootout he and Reed enjoyed at the Ryder Cup.
McIlroy can win here. He probably needs to end his decade-long major-championship drought somewhere else first, to ease some of the burden. But he also has to stop battling himself.
Next year, he ought to drive down Magnolia Lane every day and think, “I’ve never gotten it done here. But I’m going to do it now.” Stop pretending he is someone else or anywhere else. That hasn’t worked yet. Why would it work now?
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Rory McIlroy’s Latest Meltdown Shows He Needs a New Approach at Augusta.
