Sky Sports Golf anchor Nick Dougherty called it perfectly after Rory McIlroy missed the putt on the 72nd hole to force himself into a play off. “Unbearable and unmissable,” said the Sky man, and doesn’t that just sum up the experience of watching Rory on TV over the last 11 years?
Sir Nick Faldo, also on Sky, said that McIlroy had delivered “the most riveting and agonising golf and emotions we have all ever been through – and for that I want to give him a smack round the face and a big kiss.” Not all of us would necessarily go that far but it certainly speaks to the strong feelings that McIlroy generates in both devotees and haters alike.
Sky’s Masters coverage was the most anticipated sports broadcast of the year so far because McIlroy versus Bryson DeChambeau was a proper duel between two chalk-and-cheese characters who do not appear to like each other very much. In the end, that showdown didn’t really happen, but maybe that made it even more watchable because the drama became truly zoomed in on one man. Rory that is, not Sir Nick Faldo, despite the latter’s best efforts to make the story about him.
Rory had said beforehand that he was determined not to make it a rematch of the US Open last year, that he wanted “to surround myself in my own little cocoon, get in my own little bubble”. DeChambeau’s stated game plan, paraphrased in summary: “USA! USA! USA!”
I suspect I am not alone among British and Irish golf fans in finding DeChambeau a difficult chap to warm to: taking the Saudi shilling; the love-in with President Trump; refusing to get a Covid vaccine; and a personal YouTube channel which is the viewing equivalent of watching a frat boy crush beer cans on his head non-stop for hours while everybody shouts “bro!” at each other. That silly skull and crossbones baseball cap. Perhaps it would not be so bad if Bryson DeChambeau had a less preposterous name.
McIlroy, by contrast, has been a diamond: a brilliant, sometimes frustrating talent, an ambassador for his sport and a gentleman. We have watched him grow up in public, under intense scrutiny: he is still only 35 but it feels like he has been around forever. Those clips of him as a kid, chipping balls into the washing machine on Gerry Kelly’s TV talk show, already the under-10 world golf champion, showing a mixture of genius and the love of the game and maybe intimations too of the pressure and perfectionism. To see his outpouring of emotion on Sunday night felt like the culmination of an epic voyage not just for him but for those of us who have watched him on telly every step, and mis-step, of the way.
