The fire burns as strongly as ever, that under-the-skin desire to achieve great things surfacing in the hard act of winning. Rory McIlroy’s message to his caddie Harry Diamond as they walked up the 18th fairway at Pebble Beach on California’s Monterey peninsula en route to victory in the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am was simple.
“Start how you mean to go on,” were the words spoken from player to bagman. Yet McIlroy’s clubs – in every department of his game – did the talking through the four rounds that delivered a 27th win on the PGA Tour. This win also delivered a message to one and all that the business of winning is still what provides the driving motivation at the start of a season which leads very quickly to the Masters and onwards in search of further career Majors and all in a Ryder Cup year.
Indeed, McIlroy is a country mile ahead of Tyrrell Hatton in Europe’s Ryder Cup standings, where he will again be the on-course leader for the match at Bethpage Black in September, but the other significant move from Pebble Beach came from Shane Lowry, whose runner-up finish enabled him to leapfrog no fewer than 20 places up to fourth in the qualifying standings.
For McIlroy, though, the early-season win – in his first tournament of the year on the PGA Tour – provided confirmation, if needed, that the work done on his swing, which included weeks firing balls into a simulator screen, have him where he would want to be headed into that perennial quest for a green jacket and other personal ambitions.
As he put it in the aftermath of his master class on the iconic links, where his name will join the champions’ wall roll-of-honour, “there’s specific things and specific tournaments that I would love to have on my CV when it’s all said and done”.
McIlroy’s latest win didn’t actually enable him to make any upward movement on the updated world rankings, remaining in third place but closing the gap on Xander Schauffele in second to 0.3 points. Scottie Scheffler, who has been number one since May 2023, a stint of 90 weeks, remains untouchable for now.
But McIlroy – who spent a total of 122 weeks as world number one at nine different stages of his career, most recently a 16-week stretch from October 2022 to February 2023 – expressed the view that such ambitions are achievable.
“I know if I can play to my capabilities and do what I did out there (at Pebble Beach) a little bit more, the world rankings or the wins or whatever will really take care of themselves. Scottie is and has been the best player in our game for the last couple years. I feel like I’ve been close but just not quite there. But that’s motivating, that’s motivating to try to get the best out of myself and, yeah, try to become the best player in the world again.”
McIlroy in fact admitted that he had used past pairings playing alongside Scheffler in developing his own mindset in a bid for greater consistency and in how to keep big numbers off his scorecard.
This year again presents McIlroy with opportunities to add to the four career Majors that were won so early on in his career, the last of those four coming in the 2014 US PGA Championship. And of course that visit to Augusta each April brings with it the tantalising bid to complete the career Grand Slam.
At 35 years of age McIlroy is adamant that experience can be an asset. “I finally feel that my game can travel to any sort of golf course in any conditions, in any set-up really. I feel like I’m a very well rounded golfer and I can adapt to whatever I need to adapt to.”
McIlroy’s reduced playing schedule this season, cutting down on the 27 he played in 2023 to a more manageable 22 or 23, albeit with TGL now also added to his commitments with the launch of that simulator league, appears to be already paying off. He is not playing this week’s Phoenix Open and instead will return to tournament action at next week’s Genesis Invitational at Torrey Pines and then won’t appear again until the Arnold Palmer Invitational (March 6th-9th) and The Players (March 13th-16th).
Lowry also had much to take from his runner-up finish to McIlroy at Pebble Beach. Aside from moving up to fourth in the Europe Ryder Cup standings Lowry jumped to ninth on the FedEx Cup rankings and moved up 10 places to 18th on the official world golf rankings.
“To go head-to-head with Rory down the stretch, it’s pretty nice. You know, the older I get the doubts do creep in every year if you still kind of have it at this level, when you go out there, and I showed even without my best stuff what I was made of today. I’m pretty proud of myself,” said Lowry, who also has an off-week before teeing up at the Genesis Invitational, another of the PGA Tour’s limited field signature events.
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