Malachy Clerkin: Rory McIlroy is the most underrated figure in Irish sport

Working on a podcast a few years back, we had a producer who was much smarter than us, the two presenters chancing our way through the talky bit.

She did all the important stuff while we basically lowed away at each other like a pair of hairy cattle coming home on mart day. She liked sport well enough but had the good sense not to be too into it, a level of restraint we so obviously lacked.

One Monday morning she came in and idly asked: “Is Rory McIlroy Ireland’s worst ever golfer?”

Just like that, straight out with it. It was prompted by the radio news on the way in, which had carried a report on McIlroy finishing third or fifth or something in a PGA Tour event overnight.

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“Every time I hear his name being mentioned, he’s after losing again.”

She knew what she was at, of course. We blustered and frothed at the impertinence while she delighted in how little effort she’d had to put into getting the rise out of us. She hadn’t even hung up her coat and she had us one-down already. She has since left for the tech industry, where nobody gets her little jokes.

It’s a thing though, isn’t it? That disconnect between what McIlroy achieves in his sport and the acclaim he receives for it in Ireland is always there.

He won his third Tour Championship last Sunday – Tiger Woods is the only other player in history to have done it three times. He came from six shots back in the final round to beat Scottie Scheffler, the world number one. Any way you cut it, it was a monumental day’s work.

Now, it would be wrong to try and argue that the achievement was ignored in the days that followed. Even though it was late on Sunday night, his picture still made the front page of the papers.

Ireland is one of very few countries on the planet where a golfer winning a tournament would command any media attention at all. We sometimes forget, in our little golfy sewing circle, just how small an imprint the sport leaves on the wider world.

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But you wouldn’t say the win was in danger of being overcelebrated either. He was the first story on the 7.30 sports bulletin on Morning Ireland but got bumped down a slot by 8.30, as news of Tyrone footballer Conor McKenna going back to Aussie Rules was breaking.

Globally famous sports star gazumped by an off-season story about the loss of a player from a team who went out in the first round of the qualifiers.

That said, the media stuff isn’t really the point. It’s a more nebulous thing, harder to pin down with anything empirical. But if you’ve ever brought McIlroy up in company, you know it’s there. That moment of pregnant silence before someone pipes up with, “I just can’t warm to him”.

People are obviously free to like who they like. And, more to the point, to dislike who they like. As with all sportspeople in the public eye, McIlroy lives his life at such a remove from the general population that any judgement either way has no real substance to it. Defending McIlroy to the death makes just as little sense as shrugging and announcing you simply don’t like the dude.

But as a piece of idle social pondering, he’s such a compelling case study precisely because all the ingredients are there to make him a folk hero. He is better at golf – and wildly more successful – than most of our favourite sportspeople can dream of being at their chosen sport.

The four-time Major champion won three times on the PGA Tour in the season just gone and had 10 top-10 finishes. The difference between a top-10 finish and a top-30 is one putt a day not dropping. Can you imagine how good you need to be to so consistently come out on the right side of such tiny margins?

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McIlroy is a genuinely fascinating person into the bargain – open, interesting, interested in the world around him. So many sportspeople are coy and deliberately evasive in public, so unwilling to make mistakes.

McIlroy swings at any pitch you want to throw at him and makes plenty of mistakes along the way. He played golf with Trump. He criticised Trump. He said he’d never play with him again. Life went on.

So what is it?

For some people, it’s the fact that he prevaricated over playing for Ireland in the Olympics. If that’s the case, it says way more about them than it does about him.

If you’ve never had reason to interrogate the nature of your identity then simple decency suggests the least you owe those who have is whatever leeway they need to do so. If you don’t like Rory McIlroy because he’s a Nordie who could have played for the Brits but decided against it in the end, it probably doesn’t say much for the prospects of a shared future.

It can’t be that he hasn’t won a Major title in eight years, can it? Or that he was useless in the last couple of Ryder Cups? The country takes plenty of sportspeople to their hearts regardless of their level of success.

Some golf people have a thing against him because he doesn’t always play the Irish Open these days. Which would be fair enough, except there might not be an Irish Open these days without his intervention a few years ago.

All in all, it’s a strange one. McIlroy is the best golfer we have ever produced. When we’re all dust 77 years from now and they’re compiling lists of the greatest Irish sportspeople of the 21st century, he is already shoo-in to make the grade. The only question is how high on the list. Yet here and now, astonishingly, he is probably the most underrated figure in Irish sport.

We’re an ornery lot at the back of it all.