Rory McIlroy keeps focus on bigger picture before Open homecoming
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McIlroy will contest The Open at childhood course Royal Portrush but is keen to emphasise the wider context of a major being played in Northern Ireland
When Rory McIlroy says he is treating this like any other Open Championship it is not clear who he thinks he is kidding. Maybe he is more worried about persuading himself than he is anyone else, that it is his way of coping with all the emotional pressure he feels about playing here in what he has repeatedly described as one of the most important tournaments of his life. Every major matters but this one matters more than most, for him and for his country.
McIlroy lives in Florida but he still calls Northern Ireland home and he has an interesting, informed perspective on how significant this Championship is. “Sport has an unbelievable ability to bring people together,” he said. “We all know that this country sometimes needs that. This has the ability to do that.
“Talking about legacy, that could be the biggest impact this tournament has outside of sport: people are coming here to enjoy it and have a good time and forget everything else that goes on.”
McIlroy has often said how lucky he was to grow up oblivious to the Troubles, although his great uncle was murdered in a sectarian killing in 1972. “It’s amazing to think 40 years on it’s such a great place,” he said. “No one cares who they are, where they’re from, what background they’re from, but you can have a great life and it doesn’t matter what side of the street you come from.
“To be able to have this tournament here again speaks volumes about where the country is and where the people that live here are now. We’re so far past that and that’s a wonderful thing.”
There will be almost a quarter of a million spectators here this week, most of them pulling for him. McIlroy did not grow up in Portrush but he learned a lot of his golf here, on the chipping green while his dad was playing in the local tournaments. “They were my summers,” he said.
In winters he would be doing the same thing along the corridor through the open door of his mother’s washing machine. Nike has made him a set of polo shirts with a little washing machine logo on them to wear this week and there are a couple of machines set up in the centre of the village for everyone else to have a go.
When McIlroy turned 10, his dad brought him here to play for his birthday present. Six years later he broke the course record when he shot 61 in the Northern Ireland Amateur Open, 33 out, 28 back, three lower than anyone had gone before.
“Portrush has been a big part of my upbringing,” he said, even if the course is different now since they had to build two new holes and lengthen the rest to bring it up to Championship standard.
McIlroy was worried it might have changed in other ways too. “I got here last Saturday thinking the course is going to change, the set-up for an Open might be different.”
He had not seen his mum in three months and they had planned to meet for dinner at eight that evening. It was later than he would like but he needed it to be. “I was thinking I was going to have to spend some time around the greens,” he said.
It turned out they were exactly the same as they had always been. “I got on the road back home and rang them and said: ‘Can we move dinner up? Because I finished early.’ There’s no difference. It’s the same course. I was making it a little bit bigger in my head than it needed to be.”
He often seems to have that problem. It has been five years since he won his last major, at Valhalla in 2014. While he says he feels this is “the most consistent period of golf I’ve ever played” he still seems to be searching for the edge he had at his very best. Watching him play, listening to him talk, it never feels as if he is quite sure where to look for it. He turned up at the Masters this year with a new performance guru, Dr Clayton Skaggs, and was raving about OG Mandino’s self-help book, The Greatest Salesman in the World, while on Wednesday he was talking again about his meditation routine. Maybe McIlroy will find what he needs right here at home, where he played so much brilliant, carefree golf.
“It can go one of two ways, right? I’ve always felt I’ve played my best golf when I’ve been totally relaxed and loose and maybe that environment is what I need. But at the same time I can’t just put the blinkers on and pretend that’s not all going on. If you can look at the bigger picture and you can see that, it takes a little bit of the pressure off. I still want to play well and concentrate and do all the right things but at the same time having that perspective might just make me relax a little bit more.”
McIlroy sums it up by saying his mantra for the week is to “look around and smell the roses”, although there are not too many of them out in the wild fescue.
“This is a wonderful thing for this country and golf in general and to be quite a big part of it is an honour and a privilege. I want to keep reminding myself of that, that this is bigger than me, right? This is bigger than me.”
It is bigger than him, yes, but it will be a lot bigger again if he wins the thing.