Rory McIlroy’s pre-major press scrums still one of golf’s hottest tickets

OAKMONT, Pa. — Rory McIlroy’s press conference was scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. Tuesday, but it started five minutes early. The tent was packed, and Rory was in his swivel seat, on a riser, behind a catering table, about three feet above sea level — above the writers and bloggers and shooters and the others. Why postpone joy?

With Tiger in semi-retirement, the best pre-tournament show in town — name your town — is the Rory McIlroy press conference. He’s there to sell himself, Nike and this game he plays for fame and glory. We watch him, before, during and after, hopeful that some of it, the golf skill and the golfing magic, will rub off on us. We pay for the privilege. He gets paid. There’s no product here, but it is not a zero-sum game. If it were, you’d be reading something else now, and not watching NBC on Sunday afternoon, Brad Faxon and peeps presiding.

He’s an astoundingly good talker, on the many occasions when Rory McIlroy decides to talk. (The PGA Championship last month, at Quail Hollow, was, as he noted, kind of a “weird week.” You could say he made it one, with his radio silence.)

In his generation, as a talker, Rory McIlroy is without peer. A half-generation ahead of him, there was a Big Three of plus-four talkers in his class if not better: Padraig Harrington, Phil Mickelson and Colin Montgomerie. Before those gents there was the original Big Three of the golf-on-TV age, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus and L. Trevino. Since he was a teenager, McIlroy has been playing to packed crowds.

On Tuesday, in the USGA’s Cisco-sponsored interview tent (only the loos are not for sale), there were about 40 seats in the infield, just below McIlroy’s stage. Every last seat was taken. The wings, to the left and right, were crowded. Beyond the seats, there were a few dozen others standing at tall tables, suitable for cocktails and snacks but here holding cellphones and reporter notebooks, though those are not the staple they once were. A USGA media official, Julia Pine, seated to McIlroy’s right, pointed to volunteers who handed microphones to each reporter chosen to pose a question. The protocol for reporters is to ask one question, with a quick follow-up permitted. By custom, almost nobody asks personal questions. I’m not even going to give you an example of the most personal question someone might ask, because that is too personal. Golf’s different. It just is.

Jenna Harner was there to ask McIlroy a Pittsburgh question. Harner is a sports anchor and reporter for the NBC affiliate in Pittsburgh, WPXI. She is a regular at Steelers games, at Pirates games, at Penguin games. This U.S. Open is her first major golf championship. She drove to work — the Oakmont Country Club — with butterflies in her stomach and the hint of ambivalence. The Steelers were having their first day of minicamp on Tuesday and Aaron Rodgers was making his debut as the Steelers’ new quarterback. So, speaking of sports in one of America’s great sports cities, kind of a big deal.

But the chance to see Rory McIlroy in person trumped all. She was plugged into everything that was going on at the minicamp, but she was hanging on McIlroy’s every word. He uttered about 2,000 of them over the course of his 15-minute interview inside the Cisco interview tent and another couple thousand outside it, with radio interviews and others. If you strung all those words together, you’d have a long magazine piece. Look is one of his go-to words. Also, so yeah. The words flow effortlessly, and his ideas are often original. “You dream about the final putt going in at the Masters, but you don’t think about what comes next,” he said, explaining the unknowns that have come his way these past two months.

Outside, almost against a fence, McIlroy answered questions from two radio reporters he has known from the United Kingdom going back for years. A dozen or more reporters formed a bulky semi-circle behind them. A kid peered through a small gap in the fence to see what was going on. Harner, the local sports anchor, was watching carefully, trying to catch McIlroy’s eye and get in there with a question of her own. It didn’t happen.

“Everybody else is going to ask him about his golf and the course and all of that, but I wanted to ask him about Pittsburgh and the fans here,” Harner said.

She didn’t get the chance. That’s a regular thing, at a Rory McIlroy press conference. There are always questions left on the cutting room floor.

McIlroy did take a question about his comfort in these settings, talking about himself and the game he plays. “I love myself and I love golf, so I’m pretty comfortable talking about both of those things,” he said. “I think you’re always going to be really comfortable talking about subjects that you feel like you know a lot about, and I think I know a lot about golf, and especially my golf. There’s no one better to tell you about my game and what I’m thinking and how I’m feeling than me. 

“I’ve always enjoyed that. I’ve always enjoyed talking about the game.”

Bryson DeChambeau came in next. He won last year’s U.S. Open, you may recall, by a shot over McIlroy. He came in at 2 p.m. He was really good, interesting, engaging, not going through the motions by any means. But the tent was half-filled, if that. Rory McIlroy had left the building and dozens of reporters followed him out.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com