CHARLOTTE, N.C. — For Rory McIlroy, a simple question: Now what?
On Wednesday morning ahead of the PGA Championship at Quail Hollow, the newly minted career grand slam winner admitted that his headspace has shifted in the weeks following his Masters victory. In a resume filled with impressive adjectives, “Grand Slam winner” is the first and final.
“I’ve done everything I’ve wanted to do in the game,” McIlroy said bluntly. “I dreamed as a child of becoming the best player in the world and winning all the majors. I’ve done that. Everything beyond this, for however long I decide to play the game competitively, is a bonus.”
It’s possible to read that and wonder where McIlroy will find his motivation, now that he’s come this far. But something McIlroy said weeks ago hinted at the next stage of his career before he’d even reached it.
“We talk about trying to chase a feeling on the golf course,” McIlroy said on Masters Tuesday, five days before he won his fifth major championship at Augusta National. “If you’re on the golf course, what way do you want to feel when you’re playing golf? That’s not something I just do here, but I do every week that I compete. If I can chase that feeling and make that the important thing, then hopefully the golf will take care of itself.”
In the moment, McIlroy was speaking to his efforts to ground himself against the weight of his wildest golf dreams. Tackling a task as massive and meaningful as the slam requires getting lost in the process, not the outcome. Now, at the PGA Championship, he faces a different type of task — repeating the performance without the same stakes.
It may seem ridiculous to question McIlroy’s competitive fire. Professional golfers are competitors by definition, an elite class of humans who possess an unusual blend of skill and temerity. Those two components are the spark and wood behind the fire needed to survive in today’s pro game. Winning doesn’t douse the flames; it often fans them.
But nothing about McIlroy’s victory at Augusta National was typical. His win, his “release” of emotion on the 18th green, his acknowledgment, with the green jacket draped over his shoulders, that his dreams “came true today” — all of it suggested that we will always view the Masters as the culmination of Rory’s career. That has to have an effect.
If there’s a Tour peer who can serve as authority on McIlroy’s mindset it’s Shane Lowry, a McIlroy confidante and himself a major champion with some experience in the balance between enjoying your accomplishments versus prepping for the next ones.
“In 2019 when I won The Open, I found it hard,” said Lowry at the Truist. “You almost want too much to forget about that and move on.”
“I think there’s a part of you that should enjoy what you’ve just done and allow yourself to … I suppose not try too hard to back up what you’ve done,” he added with a grin. “Look, I’m sure Rory’s won enough times to reset his goals and move on, so I don’t know why I’m answering that question.”
But to hear him tell it, the next stage of McIlroy’s golf career — the next stage of his life, really — will be determined not by dreams and results but by the comparatively mundane moments that precede them. From here on out, his career will be described not by results but by something far less concrete: that feeling.
Perhaps, as Lowry knows firsthand, the change will befuddle a star golfer capable of sensing even molecular shifts in his environment.
“Look, you try to put it behind you, but it’s such a big win,” Lowry said. “I guess for the next while, when you have tough days, it kind of is there in the back of your head that you’ve achieved something great.”
But perhaps, as Curtis Strange suggested, McIlroy’s mental shift will grant him a kind of mental freedom that eluded him in his decade-long major championship drought. He’s hardly accomplished everything, after all. (“He could be the next really great story … for the Grand Slam this year,” said Strange.) And it’s also possible that McIlroy’s transformation is already complete. Perhaps the source of his Masters victory was less about the history intoned by the sleeves of the 38R green jacket and more about the feeling he chased (albeit nauseatingly) into them.
Let’s get more specific, then. What feeling is that?
“I guess the best way to describe it is it’s a combination of trust, commitment, acceptance and joy — all sort of mangled together,” McIlroy said with a smile. “That’s the easiest way to describe it.”
The next chapter of McIlroy’s competitive life begins on Thursday morning at the PGA Championship. There is nothing left to prove, but there is a feeling worth chasing at the intersection of trust, commitment, acceptance and joy. McIlroy uses four words to describe it, but the dictionary only uses one: Greatness.
In hindsight, greatness can be a list of accomplishments. But in practice, greatness is an action and a feeling. Greatness is the pursuit that will fill McIlroy’s days now that there’s no empty shelf in his trophy room. Greatness can be fleeting, if the fire goes out. But what got McIlroy to this point is what will get him past it: motivation that transcends paycheck or trophy.
“I keep saying to him, no matter what he does now, it doesn’t matter,” Lowry said. “I’m sure he doesn’t think like that. I’m sure he’s very driven to win more.”
McIlroy is driven, yes. But that’s where Lowry gets it wrong.
Winning isn’t the measure of success anymore. It’s just an outcome. It’s the result of McIlroy chasing a feeling. And he seems to relish in that chase.
