ATLANTA, Ga. — Rory McIlroy was walking down the ninth hole at East Lake Golf Club on Wednesday afternoon as he tried to find the words to sum up his PGA Tour season. But after a moment he gave up on words and made a noise instead, something like mblehh, slightly drawn out, like air releasing from a balloon.
It was hot in Atlanta. Hot hot. Ninety-four degrees and climbing, sun baking, air sitting still, all of it inspiring a certain malaise. Mostly McIlroy was in good spirits, enjoying a walk and a match with Shane Lowry, likely his closest friend on Tour. The course was empty ahead of them — a 30-player field doesn’t do much to fill up a practice-round tee sheet — so they advanced at their own pace, slowing at the greens to hit extra chip shots around the brand-new surfaces. For the chasers, every shot counts this week; even for someone who’s cashed as many checks as McIlroy, a first-place prize of $25 million is an attention-grabber.
But the Tour Championship is also a reminder of your year, of what’s happened and what you wish had happened, and for McIlroy the void between those two things has been meaningful this year. Hence the deflated sigh.
“I feel like I’ve played better golf than the results suggest,” he continued. “I had a really good chance to win another major. I think I’ve had, y’know, a couple of good wins and whatever, but it’s…”
Here he trailed off. Everything after “another major” was unconvincing. It was all whatever. This is the curse of McIlroy’s success and of his expectations and of his shortcomings. Every year now feels like major or bust, even this year, where he has the same number of worldwide wins (three) than finishes outside the top 25.
It goes without saying that this is not the standard for most golfers, nor should it be — there are few enough satisfied Tour pros as it is. Lowry, for instance, is delighted just to have qualified for the Tour Championship. “Almost embarrassing that I haven’t been here,” he joked. “Been a pro a long time and whatever.” But for McIlroy it’s different. Because of his talent level. Because of his four majors, won in quick succession. Because of the time that has passed since winning that fourth. Because he’s won everything else in the decade since.
His dissatisfaction doesn’t render the victories meaningless. McIlroy enjoyed his Zurich Classic win with Lowry as his teammate. He enjoyed his next start too, a statement victory at Quail Hollow, where he chased down Xander Schauffele on Sunday and played some of his best golf in recent memory. But Schauffele got him back the next week at the PGA Championship, the one that counted extra. That proved to be the theme of the year.
“You know, seeing what Scottie [Scheffler] and Xander [Schauffele] have done this year — I’m third in the world rankings, but I feel like a distant third,” McIlroy said. Scheffler has six wins plus Olympic gold in 2024. Schauffele picked off two majors and a boatload more top fives. “You know, they’ve had great years, and I look at my year compared to them and, I mean, it doesn’t compare.”
It’s been easy to see McIlroy on edge in recent weeks, put off by one too many swing thoughts and the lethargy of late summer in, say, Memphis, Tenn. He played particularly poorly there in the first round of the FedEx Cup Playoffs, beating almost nobody. Even at the BMW in Denver — a tournament he says he roundly enjoyed — his frustration bubbled over; he tossed his club into the water on one hole and leaned on it so hard it snapped on another. It’s hard to know the toll of McIlroy’s personal life playing out publicly this summer. But even sticking to on-course heartbreak it’s easy to trace this impatience directly back to the year’s biggest frustration, the final three holes at Pinehurst, where he let the U.S. Open slip from his grasp.
McIlroy is hardly the only one here battling exhaustion and eyeing the finish line. Scheffler had a short fuse in Denver, too. And even the stoic Schauffele spoke to the dangers of his “patience bucket” getting a little empty.
“Yeah, I can feel myself get to the edge quicker, more frustrated quicker,” Schauffele said. “You have to check yourself a lot whenever you’re trying to compete.” Easier said than done.
McIlroy admitted he feels underwhelmed by the progress pro golf made this season, too. It was two years ago this time that McIlroy was leading the Tour’s charge for a revitalized product. He drew energy from being in that mix, from effecting change, from battling for its future. In recent months he’s called for the golf world’s unification, but that hasn’t gotten things over the line; PIF-PGA Tour talks drag on, no end in sight. It’s easy to get disillusioned with the lack of progress.
“More of the same, I guess,” he said, asked for a summation of the year for the sport. “I thought there would have been more progress made, which is unfortunate. I think at this point, everyone’s just getting bored of it, just getting tired of it. It’s just become a bit of a cloud over golf. But a very niche cloud, y’know?
“I wish more would have been done, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of willingness from some people to try to fix it.”
Does he still feel a need for things to come together? Earlier in the day PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan said that, although the two sides are at the table, the Tour is also moving “forward at all speed” with its own product. The implication was clear: We don’t need this. But McIlroy believes reunification brings with it a higher ceiling.
“Yeah. I mean, I was on the wrong end of it, but look at the numbers that Bryson and I did at Pinehurst,” he said, referring to big-time U.S. Open TV ratings as the two battled down the stretch. “That’s what needs to happen.
“[LIV] have a lot of the personalities, you know. The PGA Tour, I mean, we’re here trying to create the best product. You need villains.
“Otherwise it can get flat.”
