Has there ever been an athlete who made playing look so easy, and winning seem so hard?
On Sunday morning, everyone in Augusta was asking variations on the same single question. “Gonna be his year this year?” the man on the bag check asked. “Do you think he’ll get it done?” the woman guarding the crosswalk asked. “This time, huh, this time?” the man on the door asked.
Somewhere across town, Rory McIlroy must have had the very same sort of thoughts running around the back of his mind. After what has happened here over the years, anyone who said they knew the answer was kidding themselves. The superstitious were still holding off answering one way or the other as he came up the 18th fairway for the second time.
Some people had made up their minds by the time he had walked off the 1st green, when, after a couple of missed putts, his two‑shot overnight lead was already gone; others waited until the 2nd, where he cuffed his drive into the fairway bunker and scuffed a par after dumping a pitch into the middle of the green.
If you were watching closely, you will have got your first good hint that it was maybe, just maybe, going to be McIlroy’s day after all on the 5th, the hardest hole on the course, where his drive flew wide right into the trees. “Oh no!” McIlroy cried in the split second after he hit it: “Oh no! Sit! Sit! Sit! Fore!” He walked up the fairway in all sorts of trouble, only to find, when he arrived at his ball, that there was a little gap ahead of him. Past one tree, over another, and around a TV tower, there was just a little glimmer of the flickering yellow flag on the green. McIlroy threaded his ball straight through it and on 175 yards, where it settled 15 yards shy of the pin, a simple chip and putt-in.
And you wonder why Bernhard Langer says he was born again after he won the Masters for the first time.
McIlroy seems to confront myriad possibilities every time he stands over the ball. He is, just about everyone agrees, the most gifted player of his era, a man who can play every known shot in golf, and a couple more no one even knew existed until he tried them. For McIlroy, there are a near limitless number of ways to play his way around Augusta National. His problem has always been in figuring out which one of them is going to work best. There are golfers who have a gift for making the game simple, Scottie Scheffler carries Occam’s razor right by his TaylorMade driver, but McIlroy’s never been one of them.
Every decision he makes seems to be fraught, as if they’re about to fork into some alternate universe. In some other world, McIlroy won this title way back in 2011 when, only 21, he had a three‑shot lead at the turn on Sunday. Maybe the drive he pulled left on the 10th that year hit a bough and rebounded out on to the fairway, maybe the pitch he hit from off the back of the green fetched up near the pin. But back in this world, the drive ended up out by the cabins, the pitch ricocheted back down by his feet, and he made a triple bogey which has since haunted him ;only last month a heckler at the Players Championship shouted: “Just like Augusta in 2011!”
With McIlroy, you just never know. He is a man who can choose to do the sensible thing and play lay-up on the par-five 13th, then duff his third shot right into Rae’s Creek regardless. And he is a man who, finding himself all of a sudden in a three-way tie for the lead with five holes to play, can lash the ball 200 yards from the middle of the 15th fairway and all the way to six feet from the pin to make a birdie. Even this week, he made four double bogeys, which is more than any Masters champion in the long history of the tournament.
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In the past 40 years, no one else has made even so few as two of them and gone on to win.
His fortunes blow like the wind. Which is why, over the 15 years of trying, he seems to have gone about trying to grab back that opportunity he blew in 2011 in just about every way a man can. He has had more theories about what it takes to win around here than he has made birdies. In the end, it turned out that what he needed was just was just a little boldness, a lot of luck, and, most of all, a second shot at a five-foot putt to win the thing. It was, he said afterwards, “14 years in the making”. And when it finally came, the sigh he released seemed to bend the trees around the 18th green, as if it was all the sweeter for the wait.