Poor old rich old 21-year-old Rory McIlroy

PICTURE THE MOST humiliating thing you did when you were 21. In fact, just picture what you were doing when you were 21 and take out the few things that weren’t humiliating. Be relieved if there was no internet to record it for you. Be more relieved that you weren’t being watched by several hundred million people. (By the way, if you are 21 or under while reading this, thank you for bucking international media trends. That thing on your hands is called ink. It will wash off after a time.)

Rory McIlroy is 21. Last weekend he went through a public humiliation unparalleled by most 21-year-olds in our history. It was a well-paid humiliation, granted, which made it hard to mutter, “Poor guy,” without qualifying it, “Poor rich guy.” Not that it would have been about the money, even in a sport in which success is measured by how many zeroes you’ve added to your bank balance each week.

Last Sunday McIlroy had been on the verge of taking the US Masters, the most coveted trophy in a sport he has dedicated his young life to. He reached that point after three days of serene brilliance, and after a great many sports writers declared that if McIlroy was anything, he was not a choker. Oh no, not this kid. No way.

Yet the picture of the day was McIlroy burying his head in his shoulder only because that Augusta grass is too glassy to bury a head in. For this viewer it became too painful to watch. For the BBC commentator Hazel Irvine it necessitated bringing out the voice normally reserved for royal funerals. The cameras stopped showing McIlroy until he reappeared at the 18th, smiling the smile of the dazed. I had turned off by then, being utterly parochial, but there you go. I couldn’t magic him out of there, so I made him invisible instead.

The headline in one paper read: “Beyond a choke . . .” There are a few ways you could look at this, and it would go against the columnist’s rule book if one of them wasn’t a lazy stab at the McIlroy-as-Ireland analogy.

So here goes: after a life spent working very hard for no money he became very successful, and very popular, very quickly. Then, just as it looked like he was about to cement his reputation and join the world’s big boys, he plummeted spectacularly when it turned out the confidence the world had in him was groundless. Then he went and lost his golf clubs. (See page 3 of this section for the context to that joke. Although if I have to explain it . . .)

Anyway, enough of that. McIlroy proved himself quite a singular individual this week, although at first he had to prove himself quite ordinary, casting off his genius and becoming a hacker like most golfers. Anyone who has played the game knows that feeling of the ground spinning away from you, of the universe tugging at your sleeve as you swing the club, of standing near water and repeating, “Don’t hit it into the water, don’t hit it into the water.” And then hitting it into the water.

But he didn’t do what many others would have done: kick the clubs, or fling a four-iron into a tree, or run cursing into the woods. Instead he marched on for a further two hours, his head as fuzzy as his hair but his integrity still solid.

He is, remember, 21. Is his lack of experience a benefit here, as the bruises given to him by the golfing gods were on fresh skin rather than old wounds? Can he afford to joke about it because he can still look to future possibilities rather than to a growing list of failures? Whatever the answer, he was remarkably dignified afterwards, facing the press, facing the world, then going on to top the leaderboard in this weekend’s Malaysian Open.

He should have been getting an open-topped bus tour this week. There should have been days and days of coverage of his victory, his homecoming, the boost to his earning potential. There should have been pictures of him having breakfast with the (horrific) trophy, wearing the green jacket that matches no known trousers or shirt. There should have been crowds at the airport, and anecdotes from the local golf-club president about when McIlroy was an eight-year-old prodigy.

He never has to work another day in his life. He is only 21. He showed a maturity most of us didn’t have then and still don’t have. He deserves an open-top bus tour for that alone, but you know he wouldn’t take it. McIlroy may not have shown the self-control on the day it mattered, but ultimately he showed the self-control that matters.

shegarty@irishtimes.com, twitter.com/shanehegarty