TIPPING POINT:This is what Rory McIlroy's life will be now. Every move and non-move analysed, picked apart and pronounced upon, writes MALACHY CLERKIN
SOMETIMES LIFE just likes the look of you. Rory McIlroy isn’t normally given to the snarky aside but it was impossible not to smile at his Twitter message to Ian Poulter on Saturday as the Scottish Open began to look more like a Bannockburn re-enactment than a golf tournament. After taking a measure of heat for his decision not to pick up a club in anger between the US and British Opens, McIlroy couldn’t resist a gentle jab of his own as lightning storms and landslides and general chaos reigned at Castle Stuart.
“Looks like the boys in Scotland are getting a great prep for next week,” he wrote to Poulter, another who skipped the mess in Inverness and has had to fend off the odd poison-tipped arrow himself as a result. “4.40 wake-up calls and a soft golf course.” (Then he added a ;), which, for any reader who isn’t currently trying to wade through The Irish Times on the way back from Oxegen, is a smiley face emoticon. The young folk use it to denote happiness and playfulness. No point rolling your eyes at the thought, although it might be an idea to fire off a quick letter to Ruairí Quinn before they start teaching Yeats in schools using only hashtags and ampersands.)
This is what McIlroy’s life will be now. Every move and non-move analysed, picked apart and pronounced upon. Few sports find ways to knot their own knickers like golf does, as evidenced by the hilariously high dudgeon of Colin Montgomerie last week when asked about the broken shin Thomas Levet earned himself after jumping into a greenside lake upon winning the French Open.
“It’s the silliest thing that players have done over the years,” grouched Monty, “and let’s hope that’s the last time that ever happens. It is not the way to celebrate a golf tournament win. We are lucky it’s only a leg injury.” Gotta love that ‘We’. As if it wasn’t Levet’s shin that got cracked but verily the shin of all golfers. As if every one of us who ever swung a nine-iron woke up on Monday morning with a phantom limp. Golfer’s Tibia – the tennis elbow of dumb celebrations.
That ‘We’ is classic golfspeak. Or at least it’s classic Montyspeak, which can often amount to the same thing. It’s redolent of that dreary stuffiness that still exists in the sport, the P-and-Q-minding obsession with not letting the side down and not colouring outside the lines in any way. The normal person’s response to Levet’s injury is to burst out laughing and wish him well with his three months off and his €500k winner’s cheque. Just as the normal person’s response to McIlroy not playing for three weeks after winning his first major is to shrug and say good luck to him.
How McIlroy fills his schedule is nobody’s concern but his own, yet he finds himself having to justify it just because he’s doing things a different way to how they’ve been done before. Instead of the French Open, he went to Haye v Klitschko and the Wimbledon final; instead of Scotland, he stayed at home and practised away in the coolest back garden on the island. If he doesn’t win the British Open this weekend, he’ll be told it was because he didn’t play a tournament in three weeks. Never mind that the last player to follow up his first major with his second the very next time out was Craig Wood in 1941.
In a way, golf can’t be blamed for running McIlroy’s every move through the scanner just to hear him beep. That the sport is gasping for a hero to hang its hat on after growing slow and fat on the back of the last one is no secret, nor is its impatience with the streak of first-timers winning majors, which is at its longest now since the early 1970s. But by making mischief where there is none and sweating the unimaginably small stuff like this, all golf will do is loosen McIlroy’s evenness and equanimity grain by grain.
Gary Smith’s famous Tiger Woods piece in Sports Illustrated back in 1996 set the scene perfectly. In it, he laid out the battle that was about to commence between the then 20-year-old, pre-major Woods and the amorphous, insatiable fame machine into whose maw he was about to be thrown. “The machine will win because it has no mind,” Smith wrote. “It flattens even as it lifts, trivializes even as it exalts, spreads a man so wide and thin that he becomes margarine soon enough . . . The machine will win because it will wear the young man down, cloud his judgment, steal his sweetness.”
McIlroy’s fame will never approach Woodsian levels purely because he isn’t American. But as we’re already seeing, he’ll have to fight his own machine in his own way. He’ll be forced to explain everything for everybody, from his schedule choices to his nationality to his love life. If his sweetness is stolen somewhere along the way, golf will be the poorer for it. But it’ll be the price of doing business.
We can only cross our fingers for him that he hangs on to it. The racing commentator Dessie Scahill tells a lovely story from back in McIlroy’s amateur days when he and Shane Lowry used to pal about together. One weekend, McIlroy was in the south for a training weekend and stayed with Lowry. On the Saturday evening, Lowry hopped in the car and went to visit his granny, bringing McIlroy along with him.
When they got to the house, Shane introduced his young friend to his granny and all was pleasant and easy. At one point, the fire needed coal brought in, prompting the granny to turn to Rory and hand him the job. Although her grandson’s build was considerably better suited to the task, she didn’t want Shane to risk hurting his hand. He’d need it for the golf, you see. The way Dessie tells it, Rory just smiled and did as he was asked.
Everything we’ve seen from McIlroy so far suggests a boy with enough cop-on to hold tight to that good nature. But if it ebbs away over the years, there’s a decent chance it will say more about his sport than it will about him.
