AUGUSTA, Ga. – At some point generations from now, after all of us are long gone, they will look back at the records and the numbers and the championships under Rory McIlroy’s name and think that all of it was inevitable, that one of the great players in the history of golf simply did what he was always destined to do.
But sports don’t work that way. Life doesn’t work that way.
So let it be said here and for posterity that the story of how McIlroy won the 89th Masters on Sunday, becoming the sixth player to complete the career Grand Slam, was an 11-year journey of doubts and disappointments, of resilience and reckoning, of vexation before validation.
Anyone who says this was preordained for one of the most talented golfers to ever pick up a club wasn’t there as Masters after Masters passed, as the carefree kid grew into his mid-30s, as each gutting loss fed the cycle of cynicism and time started to seem a little more precious as it tends to do for an athlete who wanted something so badly.
“I’ve carried that burden since 2014,” McIlroy said, referring to the year he won the Open Championship to get three-fourths of the way there. “Thankfully now I don’t have to carry it.”
Goodness, even the idea that this was all going to end Sunday at dusk with McIlroy on the 18th green at Augusta National, flipping the putter over the back of his head, dropping to his knees and elbows on the green in an uncontrollable heaving sob, mouth agape screaming to the sky seemed unlikely, then certain, then unlikely, then certain again to who-the-hell-knows within the span of five stomach-churning hours.
When McIlroy double-bogeyed the first hole, briefly coughing up the lead to Bryson DeChambeau as they walked to the third tee, a sense of dread crept into the massive galleries that the worst might be happening again. And then at the very moment it seemed like McIlroy had the tournament sewn up, the worst did happen at No. 13 when he made one of the most inexplicable double-bogeys in nearly a century of golf here, sparking a sequence of holes and shots so improbable that we can safely call this the most dramatic Masters ever played.
“Just a complete roller coaster of emotions,” McIlroy said.
And perhaps more than that, the notion that there was always going to be a Masters out there for McIlroy to finish the Grand Slam sells short something about him far more interesting than his gift to hit a golf ball. Of anyone who has ever achieved immortal ...
