Rory McIlroy will put his heart on the line once more at the Masters, hoping resilience from past agonies pays off with a green jacket and a career Grand Slam.
The four-time major winner from Northern Ireland arrived at Augusta National this week after wins at Pebble Beach and The Players Championship, the first time he has won twice in a year before the Masters.
The world number two, who said his sore elbow feels well after treatment last week, is again tuning out talk about winning the only major to elude him.
“It’s just narratives. It’s noise. It’s just trying to block out that noise as much as possible,” McIlroy said. “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.”
After two prior trips to Augusta for practice rounds, that means watching “Bridgerton” with his wife and reading “The Reckoning” by John Grisham rather than dwelling on how he blew a four-stroke lead on Sunday at the 2011 Masters or settled for being a major runner-up each of the past three years — including a last-hole loss to Bryson DeChambeau at last year’s US Open.
“Over the course of my career I think I’ve showed quite a lot of resilience from setbacks, and I feel like I’ve done the same again, especially post-June last year and the golf that I’ve played since then, and it’s something that I’m really proud of,” McIlroy said.
“You have setbacks and you have disappointments, but as long as you can learn from them and move forward and try to put those learnings into practice I feel like is very important.
“You sort of just learn to roll with the punches, the good times, the bad times, knowing if you do the right work and you practice the right way, that those disappointments will turn into good times again pretty soon.”
McIlroy, 35, hasn’t won a major since 2014 and admits at times he has not fully thrown himself at the challenge, unwilling to risk the heartbreak of defeat for the possible joy of victory.
“It’s a self-preservation mechanism,” McIlroy said. “It’s just more of a thing where you’re trying to not put 100% of yourself out there because of that.
“At a certain point in someone’s life, someone doesn’t want to fall in love because they don’t want to get their heart broken… we hold back sometimes because of the fear of getting hurt, whether that’s a conscious decision or subconscious decision, and I think I was doing that on the golf course a little bit for a few years.
“Once you go through those heartbreaks, as I call them, or disappointments, you get to a place where you remember how it feels and you wake up the next day and you’re like life goes on, it’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be.
“It’s going through those times, especially in recent memory, where the last few years I’ve had chances to win some of the biggest golf tournaments in the world and it hasn’t quite happened.
“But life moves on. You dust yourself off and you go again. I think that’s why I’ve become a little more comfortable in laying everything out there and being somewhat vulnerable at times.”
‘Chase that feeling’
McIlroy said he changed his major attitude after the 2019 season. From 2015-2019 he had two major top-10s each year with one runner-up at 2018 British Open. From 2020-2024, his 11 major top-10 efforts included second at the 2022 Masters and 2023 and 2024 US Opens.
“I made a commitment to myself to sort of earmark these a little bit more and to give a little bit more of myself in these weeks,” he said. “That was just sitting down and reflecting at the end of 2019 thinking I need to approach these a little bit differently again.”
Now, McIlroy says, he can focus on how he feels while golfing.
“If I can chase that feeling and make that the important thing, then hopefully the golf will take care of itself,” McIlroy said.
