So to where does Rory McIlroy belong to now?
The immensity of the journey taken by the Co Down man was cleverly illuminated in the latest Nike advert, which charts his progression from nine-iron boy genius chipping and putting in the Irish twilight to the day he finally tees-off with his boyhood hero Tiger Woods. It is the kind of skilfully manipulative, heart-tugging commercial Nike has perfected and sells a message anyone can respond to: childhood as a cherished time in life.
It would have been great, of course, if the company had been conscious of that value in the decades when their clothing and footwear factories were comparable to sweat shops. But the brand has reinvented its image and has used a series of stars to redefine its place in sports apparel.
And now Rory McIlroy has become a key figure in the independent republic of Nike. Because the swoosh sign is a global symbol and even when the company was at its most ethically controversial, Nike demonstrated a genius for producing compelling portraits of their megastars. It is very difficult, for instance, to watch the Kobe Bryant ‘Just Show Us’ film without getting the shivers, mainly because Kobe Bryant in motion with a basketball is a sight of unsurpassable beauty and also because his best years are probably behind him. And many major motion picture filmmakers must have sighed in envy at the sweeping black and white images in ‘Together’ where the people of Akron, Ohio huddle up and repeat, en masse, the LeBron James chant. These are extraordinarily seductive short films that tap into something millions of viewers can understand – the usual stuff about humble roots and relentless work but presented with new emotional force allied to the stars which people revere.
Behind the architecture
“We gotta grind it out for this city,” James tells his team-mates at one point and it is that word ‘grind’ which screams out. Because for millions of people, American cities are, behind the architecture and the Starbucks, a heartless and merciless grind. And it probably is true that if James manages to bring an NBA title to Cleveland and Ohio this summer, it will be the most transcendent event to have occurred there in living memory.
Federer, Kobe, Tiger, LeBron, Messi: these are the world stars in which McIlroy keeps company and it is not merely because he is the best in the world at the sport of golf but because the image makers believe that he can become its new figurehead. Since the rapid and jaw-dropping unravelling of Tiger Woods’s pursuit of Jack Nicklaus’s haul of 18 majors, golf has badly needed a new personality and story. McIlroy, through his precocious and brilliant talent for the game and the apparently easy grace and levity with which he handled the media and public attention, was an obvious choice. And the latest advert does hammer home the fact that there is something faintly miraculous about his emergence.
It is not that long ago that there was a mini-storm about whether McIlroy would choose to play for Great Britain or Ireland when golf makes its return at the Rio Olympics next year. There was an unspoken sense that the decision would confirm just how McIlroy viewed his own identity. But the debate entirely missed the point. McIlroy is from somewhere much more specific.
The North. Ulster. Northern Ireland. The Six Counties. The Wee Six. Up There. Call it want you want but if McIlroy does manage to recover from Thursday's smoking round by Jordan Spieth to claim his first green jacket tomorrow night, it shouldn't be forgotten that he is first and foremost a son of Ulster. Yet again, the sometimes benighted province has managed to send forth into the world an outrageous talent, just like it did with George Best, with Norman Whiteside, with Barry McGuigan, with Seamus Heaney, with the Undertones, with Mary McAleese, with John Hume, with Hurricane Higgins, with Brian Friel. You can't hit a duff shot into the rough of an Ulster golf course without the risk of your golf ball landing in the ancestral ruin of some American president or other . . . they punch above their weight.
McIlory has defined himself as belonging to a generation of Ulster people who do not want to be defined by the sectarian divide and who don't look back upon the Troubles. And yet his grandfather, a Belfast shipyard worker, lost a brother in the Troubles and McIlroy's birth year, 1989, occurred when the prospect of any kind of peace seemed like a black joke. The vintage footage of McIlroy chipping golf balls through the open door of a washing machine at home features in the advert. The novelty act charmed the province when McIlroy appeared on the Kelly Show – a singularly Ulster institution – in 1999. What started out as a bit of improvised indoor practice has become enshrined, part of golfing lore.
Lifetime of work
But McIlroy belongs to the Ulster of the Gerry Kelly show, of Ravenhill and to Belfast city and Portrush. Anyone who spent time on Irish golf courses over the past two decades either heard of or saw the nascent McIlroy, when he was a teenager with precocious talent but with a lifetime of work to do in order to actually haul himself up alongside Woods.
What is staggering about McIlroy’s story is that it seems somehow predestined. He went through cold patches but his ascendancy has been achieved without any real setbacks – unless that rare and infamous collapse on the final round of the 2011 Masters counts as a setback. If so, it is one that the vast majority of elite golfers never get to experience.
The island of Ireland, of course, has had its hours of splendour in major golf tournaments before and is in the midst of an unprecedented era of accomplishment, from Harrington to McIlroy’s elder influences and fellow Ulster men G-Mac and Big Darren. But never at the Masters: never at the most visually dreamy and psychologically tortuous golf tournament of the lot. There were many years, in fact, when it was wishful thinking just to have an Irish invitee to Augusta. Having the favourite play there is a rare thing.
So Saturday morning now and the usual chat about how fast the greens at Augusta are playing and how the Masters doesn’t begin until the back nine on Sunday evening, when it will become the big draw in sports entertainment across the world. Golf is a power game, a money game: all the political and business eyes will be on McIlroy if he is in the position he expects to be going into that back nine. If he closes in on the career slam of majors, golf has its new superstar and a clean break into the post-Tiger era.
McIlroy will be pulled this way and that: everyone is going to want a piece of him. "There is home and there is home-home," he said in a recent New York Times interview, clarifying the division between the various homes around the world he lives in during the tour season and the occasional escapes back into haunts like Ravenhill and Ollies nightclub.
McIlroy belongs to golf now but if he storms to further glory in Georgia around midnight Sunday Irish time, he remains first and foremost the star of the county Down.
