Rory McIlroy’s U.S. Open theatrics ended on a strange note

OAKMONT, Pa. — The best golf is good theater.

While Rory McIlroy’s performance at this week’s U.S. Open was many things — strange, tumultuous, disappointing, mystifying — there is little debating that it was also very good theater.

The rising acts came on Thursday and Friday, when McIlroy ejected from contention by tossing clubs, shattering tee markers and shirking the press. Those moments built toward Saturday afternoon, the climax, when McIlroy surprised reporters with a bizarrely combative press conference in which he largely blamed them for his absence. They culminated on Sunday — the falling action — when McIlroy shot a breezy 3-under, spoke again on much cheerier terms, and exited into the night with a smile on his face.

If McIlroy’s U.S. Open were a movie, it would not score high points for plot clarity. Nobody in the golf world knows what’s peeving the Masters champion these days. Fewer still know what changed between Saturday and Sunday, other than perhaps his score and his travel schedule, to justify the shift in tone. We can surmise he isn’t thrilled with the coverage around his failed driver test at the PGA Championship, and is still wrangling with a green jacket/grand slam hangover, but neither of these actions fit the crime of detonating media relations after 18 years of thoughtful introspection. The larger machinations are hard to understand.

Still, if McIlroy’s U.S. Open were a movie, you’d keep watching. Perhaps not with the rapt attention you tuned in to Augusta National in April, but with the morbid intrigue you might find while consuming a Greek tragedy.

In many ways, McIlroy’s post-Masters life has been distinctly Promethean. Much like the story of the Titan who discovered fire, McIlroy’s history-changing gain appears to have come at a price. Thankfully, the press — and the golf press in particular — are friendlier punishment than a bird trained to eat his liver, but it is not hard to see the parallel. For McIlroy, the daily questions are a reminder of the difference between fulfillment and happiness. After Augusta he will forever have the former, but at Oakmont he seemed to be missing the latter.

“Look, I climbed my Everest in April,” McIlroy said on Sunday. “I think after you do something like that, you’ve got to make your way back down, and you’ve got to look for another mountain to climb.”

McIlroy suggested that Royal Portrush, the hometown site of this year’s Open Championship, could be the new mountain he seeks — and perhaps he is right. But from the side of the clubhouse at Oakmont on Sunday afternoon, the drama of U.S. Open week seemed to be about much more than a golf course.

In many ways, this week was always about more than McIlroy’s failure to talk to the press. There has been plenty made of his absence already, but few words were more poignant than those of McIlroy’s good friend, the Golf Channel analyst Paul McGinley, during Saturday evening’s Live From.

“I didn’t enjoy [his comments]. I don’t like to see it,” McGinley said. “When he does that, because people look up to him, a conference like that with his body language and short language doesn’t serve him right. I’m disappointed for Rory that it’s come to that. Something is eating at him. He hasn’t let us know what it is, but there’s something not right.”

Rather, McIlroy’s U.S. Open was really about the final part of McGinley’s analysis, about what serves Rory. After a decade of torment and many, many painful press conferences, it does not serve McIlroy to live out his days battling a media cold war like the protagonist in a Greek tragedy. It serves McIlroy to live comfortably with the fulfillment he worked so hard to achieve — to not just star in his story but enjoy it, too.

Anyone who has been afforded a great fortune will tell you this is much easier said than done. When the universe grants a great gift, it often comes at a great price.

This will be the challenge and the intrigue of the next chapter — a chapter Rory McIlroy has only recently started writing.

Either way, it will be great theater. But the big question remains: For whom?