PORTRUSH, Northern Ireland — The moment of redemption arrived quickly for Rory McIlroy at the Open Championship.
Shortly after 3 p.m. local time on a blustery Thursday afternoon in Portrush, McIlroy heard his name called, stepped to the first tee box, and plunged his tee into the earth. He took a few slow practice swings. He settled himself. He breathed.
McIlroy and the few thousand ringing the first fairway at Portrush did not need to be reminded of the gravity of the moment. Six years ago, in this very spot and on this very day, Rory’s home Open Championship ended almost as soon as it began, his first tee shot bounding out of bounds on the right side of the first hole. McIlroy started the 2019 Open by recording a quadruple-bogey 8 on No. 1, fueling a Thursday 79 that led to a stunning missed cut.
“It was just the fourth quad he’s made in more than 10,000 holes played on the PGA Tour (he’s never made worse than a quadruple-bogey, either), and his second in a major,” the PGA Tour’s Sean Martin wrote, reflecting the general sense of shock sifting through Northern Ireland. “McIlroy shot 61 at Royal Portrush when he was 16. On Thursday, he took his 61st stroke on the 15th hole.”
McIlroy’s dreams ended in tears on Friday afternoon, and there was little ambiguity about who deserved the blame. In one of the biggest moments of his career, McIlroy had choked.
“I didn’t play my part,” he said later. “But everyone in Northern Ireland that came out to watch me definitely played theirs.”
Six years later, the stakes reset. As the afternoon arrived on Thursday in Northern Ireland, McIlroy stood on the elevator-shaft first hole of the Open Championship at Royal Portrush with a rabid crowd surrounding him and the weight of expectation upon him. Now, with his ball settled on the tee box, he could wait no longer.
He waggled, paused, and swung.
FOR AT LEAST ONE GROUP watching the Open from home on that Thursday in 2019, McIlroy’s disaster on the 1st hole was hardly a surprise.
In fact, it could be explained quite easily, utilizing only a handful of pieces of readily available clinical data, and its solution could be boiled down to a single word.
“I’ve been really interested in why we sometimes perform more poorly than our skill level suggests precisely when there’s something on the line,” Dr. Sian Beilock, the president of Dartmouth and also one of the nation’s foremost experts on the psychology of choking, told me.
“Most of my work suggests that we get in our own way,” Dr. Beilock said. “We start worrying. We worry about the situation, the consequences, everything riding on it, and oftentimes we pay too much attention to our own performance. We disrupt what should just be automatic and effortless, and we actually screw ourselves up.”
I first connected with Dr. Beilock in June after seeing a Ted Talk she’d given on the psychology of peak performance. To Beilock, whose work as a cognitive scientist has included more than 120 published articles on the science of choking and a 2010 book named Choke, the phenomenon posed a fascinating question: Why did some athletes and professionals perform worst when it mattered most?
Dr. Beilock brought the question to the lab, where brain imaging helped measure the psychological responses to certain performance triggers. Beilock found that in high-stress performance situations, the same portion of the brain responsible for normal executive functions (the prefrontal cortex) kicked into overdrive, resulting in an avalanche of extra stimulation. In some instances, the brain even generated a pain response to the psychological stress of high-leverage moments. In other words, when Beilock’s patients were psychologically choking, they were literally hurting.
“Oftentimes areas of the brain that would not be as focused on what’s going on get hyper focused,” she said. “It’s counterintuitive that paying too much attention could be disruptive, but that’s what my colleagues and I have shown. In many different situations, we start actually trying to control aspects that should just be left outside of conscious awareness.”
Beilock and her team found that most instances of choking followed a thought pattern of overthinking, or as she calls it, “paralysis by analysis.” The golf swing, which relies upon the automatic function of “procedural memory,” was a prime target for overthinkers.
“When you do start thinking, Oh my god, everything is riding on this, I think it’s really easy to try and say, How am I going to make sure this doesn’t happen?” Beilock said. “All of a sudden, you start approaching your putt or your shot very differently than you did in the past, and that can lead to poor performance.”
But understanding the root issue only brought Beilock and her colleagues so far. The goal wasn’t just to learn why people choked, but also how to fix it. To find the secret, Beilock’s team dove into a trove of data from famous athletes and performers to analyze the practice and competitive habits of those who had been in a choke-worthy situation and kept their head.
Eventually, their research yielded an interesting answer. There was a separating factor between the chokers and the non-chokers, and it could be described in a single word: Practice. Athletes with strong records in the spotlight had tricks for keeping their brain turned off during the biggest moments of their career that had been developed long before the back nine on Sunday at a major championship. Tiger Woods famously endured years of psychological games on the practice range from his father, Earl, while Jack Nicklaus developed a strategy of focusing on his pinky toes when he felt the pressure mounting, keeping his brain far from his golf swing. (Nicklaus was so skilled in golf’s ways of psychological pressure that he is largely credited for helping a competitor, Greg Norman, overcome his struggles with choking. At the 1986 Open at Turnberry, Nicklaus advised Norman to “focus on his grip pressure” during Sunday’s final-round — advice that would yield Norman’s first major win.)
“I don’t believe we’re born chokers,” Beilock said. “I just think some of us are just more practiced than others. Just like you practice any physical aspect of your game, you’ve got to practice the mental game, too.”
Beilock’s research has found that even simple practice can help with a breakthrough. For players who have struggled with short putts in big moments, for example, Beilock recommends bringing friends onto the practice green to jeer while you work on three-footers. Even the mild discomfort of a group of needling buddies can help train the brain to handle the stress of a short pressure putt.
The tricky thing, Beilock says, is what happens after a breakthrough. While it’s tempting to believe that winning is a cure-all, the research suggests that choking is much more like a muscle. You don’t “fix” choking — you merely get better at managing it. What’s more: repeated success in high pressure situations can beget an even stronger mental game, which is why some pros, like Woods and Nicklaus, seemed to grow stronger in the clutch as they aged.
“It’s a continuous fight. It’s not like winning magically changes everything you do,” Beilock said. “You’d never just say, Oh, they won that tournament, so they never have to practice again. The same thing goes for the mental.”
Rory McIlroy has been a fascinating case study into much of Beilock’s research. His performance at the 2011 Masters, the 2024 U.S. Open, and even his victory at the 2025 Masters were clear examples of battle between talent and performance that has defined her career as a clinical psychologist (and in many ways, his as a professional golfer). The Open’s return to Royal Portrush, McIlroy’s home country and the golf course where he still owns the course record, is yet another test of mettle.
IN HIS RETURN TO THE first hole on Thursday morning, McIlroy was ready for the challenge.
He made a comfortable, easy swing and watched as his ball traveled high and left, eventually settling safely in the fescue. It was a dreadful shot by the standards of a professional golfer with an iron in his hands on a par-4, but on Royal Portrush’s rail-thin first hole, it was cause for a funny reaction: an exhale.
“I just think it’s back to knowing what to expect,” McIlroy said later of his tee shot on the first. “I didn’t feel like I was walking into the unknown this time around, where last time I hadn’t experienced that before. I hadn’t played an Open at home. I didn’t know how I was going to feel. I didn’t know the reaction I was going to get. This time I had a better idea of what was going to be coming my way.”
As it turned out, McIlroy had practiced for the moment on No. 1 for days, even pumping a couple of balls out of bounds in the process. Now, with his Open officially underway, he bounded down the tee box with visible enthusiasm.
The fans cheered thunderously, and as he saw his ball nestled safely among the ferns, he looked back toward the tee box and smiled.
You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.
