The Kid Can Play

Rory McIlroy's rookie season in the major championships, like his golf swing itself, was greater than the sum of its parts

progress of a prodigy: McIlroy used one of golf's finest swings to finish T-3 at Hazeltine, his best performance in his first full year of major championships.

By Jaime Diaz

Photo by Stephen Szurlej

August 24, 2009

Everyone knows golf isn't a game of perfect, but watching Rory McIlroy's sublime swing makes people forget.

Perhaps in response to that unfairness, the 20-year-old from Northern Ireland seems determined, even in the tournament arena, to look as much as possible like a regular kid just bumping along. Between shots, he tends to let his loose-limbed 5-foot-9, 160-pound frame sag into a slouch, his golf clothes fit as if tailored by the House of Slacker and his ruddy baby face peeks out from a bushy tangle of 1960s-style tendrils that instantly emboldens spectators to say out loud, "Get a haircut."

But once he grips a club, McIlroy can't hide his talent, which makes his errant shots that much more jarring—and at times, maddening. So it was at the PGA Championship, when McIlroy, beginning his final round tied for 13th, seven strokes behind leader Tiger Woods, managed to convert a perfect drive on Hazeltine's par-4 first hole into a double bogey when he pushed a short iron and somehow took four more from the edge.

A lot of waste had come before. After beginning the championship three under par through six holes, McIlroy made six bogeys in his next 28 holes and then a double when he three-putted from 12 feet on the par-3 17th Friday. Saturday a 60-something turned into a 71 when buried bunker lies led to bogeys at the 13th and 15th.

It's the kind of stuff that calls up McIlroy's blooper reel. There was this year's Masters, where he got into contention with a birdie on the 15th Friday, only to four-putt the 16th for a double bogey and then triple-bogeyed the 18th after taking two in a greenside bunker to barely make the cut. There was Switzerland in 2008, where at the Omega European Masters he failed on a five-foot putt on the 72nd for victory and then somehow missed an 18-inch tap-in on the second hole of sudden death to hand the tournament to Jean-François Lucquin. Even when he got his first professional victory in Dubai early this year, the six-shot lead he held with six to play was down to one on the final hole.

But beyond unrealistic expectations, it gives pause to see someone so often compared to Woods—who even at a young age seldom repeated the big competitive mistakes—do such un-Woodsian things.

However, McIlroy may indeed have a perfect temperament for the game, and just as his misadventures of the last year didn't send him spiraling, neither did the opening double bogey at Hazeltine. He immediately responded with three birdies and turned in 34 after eating up a back pin on the ninth with the purest of 8-irons. There would be only one more birdie on the back nine, but more importantly, only one more bogey, and that on the ridiculously difficult 518-yard, par-4 12th. Quietly, amid the drama of Woods himself being un-Woodsian, McIlroy's closing 70 earned him a T-3, five behind Y.E. Yang.

It also completed a solid first full year of major championships that included a T-20 at the Masters, a T-10 at the U.S. Open and a T-47 at the British Open. Among the select group of players who completed 72 holes in all four Grand Slam events, McIlroy's cumulative score of five over par was only three strokes higher than leader Ross Fisher. McIlroy also proved a formidable final-round player in the game's biggest events, with an inward-nine 31 at Augusta, a 68 at Bethpage Black, and a tie for the low round Sunday at Hazeltine.

McIlroy is now ranked 22nd in the world, and his consistency in the majors is an effective rebuttal to those who question whether he will indeed be the next big thing. McIlroy is used to the backlash that comes after a hailed prodigy turns professional, but he had given skeptics more ammunition since winning at Dubai by failing to finish better than fifth in the combined 11 tournaments he played on the European and PGA tours before the PGA.