It may placate those offended by the largesse of a golfer scooping $15m for tournament success to hear that the value of that prize doesn’t matter to the individual in question. When seeking to close out the Tour Championship, with the associated FedEx Cup bounty the standard reference point, Rory McIlroy’s focus was solely on professional entities.
“I didn’t think about it once,” McIlroy insisted of the biggest pay day in golf’s history. “I was thinking about winning this tournament, winning the stroke average, getting back to second in the world. All those things are way more important to me. I realise I’m in a very privileged position that I can say that but at this stage in my career they are way more important to me.”
Success at East Lake did, however, mean McIlroy could alter the life of someone close to him. The golfer’s best friend and caddie, Harry Diamond, will collect $1.5m in line with typical percentages bestowed on a bag man. This alliance, however, stretches beyond clubs and yardages.
“Harry would be happy with anything,” said McIlroy. “It’s just so cool to be able to do this with him, aside from money or anything else. We are sharing these experiences; we watched Tiger win at East Lake a year ago and now we walk up to the last green and have that moment. That stuff is so cool and will stay with us forever. It’s worth way more than cheques.”
The scoring average to which McIlroy referred has closed at under 70 and is the best in this PGA Tour season, earning him the Vardon Trophy. Having also won the Players Championship and Canadian Open, McIlroy has a case to challenge Brooks Koepka as the player of the year. From 19 PGA Tour starts in 2019, McIlroy notched 14 top 10s. Consistency of performance is linked to a stable state of mind.
“Sometimes emotion has worked against me, and that’s the real reason that I maybe don’t show as much out there as I used to,” said the four-times major winner. “I don’t want to get too high and I don’t want to get too low.
“If I needed to get emotional and get really riled up, this isn’t the sport to do that. I’m not a football player. It’s golf, and you sort of need to try to be pretty even-keeled the whole way through.”
McIlroy, who now has only Koepka ahead of him in the world rankings, has scaled back matters of technicality. “I made a plan at the start of the year not to really focus or worry about my swing the weeks that I’m playing,” he said. “I try to do all of my work with my coach Michael Bannon on off weeks. I think you should do your work before the tournament starts, and then once you’re there, just go with what you have.”
Lessons learned 11 months ago, when McIlroy was beaten to the Tour Championship by Tiger Woods, have also proved pivotal. “I had played in another final group and didn’t get the job done,” McIlroy recalled. “I said to myself that I had to make a few changes. I started to approach things differently.”
A key example: stop treating Sundays like any other tournament round. “You have to be a realist and realise it’s not,” said McIlroy. “You have to prepare for it. Brooks went out there on Sunday in Memphis [at the World Golf Championship in July], shot 65 and just basically dominated the tournament, dominated me. I realised if I want to become the dominant player in the world again, I need to be more like that.”
It was on day one at this year’s Open that we saw McIlroy stumble. His 79 in front of a stunned audience in his native Northern Ireland proved fatal to his chances of surviving for the weekend. When assessing McIlroy’s year, this looks the clear outlier. “It is and it isn’t; the first round is but I shot six under on the second day,” he said. “So the golf was in there but I had a horrific start. It was a bit of an anomaly, I feel.
“People put their own importance on certain things, it’s all perception. The majors are very important to me, they are the biggest tournaments in the world and you want to win them but at the same time there are four chances a year. It’s not as if you don’t win them then there is nothing left to play for. It [success] is not guaranteed, there’s a law of averages.”
