Rory McIlroy at the green jacket ceremony at the Masters on Sunday.
getty images
When Rory McIlroy was a young pro touring “America” for the first time, 19 turning 20, wherever you saw him, his parents, Gerry and Rosie, were nearby. He didn’t need them for logistical support — the prodigy had been traveling the world (literally) without them since he was 10. They were busy, working full-time jobs to support his amateur golf. They were there for emotional support. Rory was an only child, and they were a threesome. They were a team.
In the years to come, Rosie often was home in Holywood, Northern Ireland, but Gerry was still on the scene, most particularly at the American majors and the Florida events.
You could see the son’s emotion, talking about his parents during the close-out Butler Cabin interview with Jim Nantz of CBS Sports on Sunday night. McIlroy was wearing green (his new club coat) and wearing it well. When McIlroy turned pro, he had bushy, curly black hair and the outer layer of his fast-twitch body was wrapped in a layer of baby fat. Now he is built like an Olympic wrestler and has silver and white coming through his banker’s haircut. Gerry McIlroy had had an impressive head of hair when he was in his late 40s, all of it white.
“We’ve talked about the journey here, what Gerry and Rose did for their boy, for him to be this career Grand Slam winner,” said Nantz, who does generation-to-generation out of his own life experience. It’s very golfy.
“There was a lot of pent-up emotion that just came out on that 18th green,” McIlroy said. “A moment like that makes all the years and all the close calls worth it. I want to say hello to my mom and dad. They’re back home in Northern Ireland.”
“They made a lot of sacrifices for you,” Nantz said. Nantz is 65, and Gerry and Rosie are in their mid-60s, too.
Rosie did assembly-line shift work in a 3M plant. Gerry tended bar and managed a golf-club locker room, where he ran the vacuum and scrubbed toilets.
“They did,” McIlroy said. “And I can’t wait to see them next week. I just can’t wait to celebrate this with them.”
Tiger Woods grew up as McIlroy did — modest house, three people in it, engaged parents. Earl could break 80 in his prime and Gerry was, for years, a true scratch golfer, competitive in the many County Down amateur events in which he played, with a fluid, no-fuss swing. But after Woods turned 30, and after he married in 2004, you seldom saw Earl on property when Tiger was competing. Gerry McIlroy on a rope line, with his son in contention, was a study in tension. Gerry McIlroy celebrating one of his son’s victories — most particularly when he won the U.S. Open at a wet Congressional in 2011 by eight shots — was a study in exuberant joy.
After McIlroy won the 2014 British Open at Royal Hoylake in England, he said, “This is the first major I’ve won when my mum has been here. Mum, this one’s for you.”
Soon after, Rosie McDonald McIlroy, with her jet-black hair and modest manner, carefully put a few fingers on the Claret Jug as her son held it tight. They were one sea (the Irish Sea) and one generation away from old Belfast, with its Catholic-Protestant and British-Irish divide. Rosie McDonald’s father drove an ice-cream truck in what passes for summer in Northern Ireland.
“Why are we not like other families?” McIlroy once asked his mother as a boy.
“We’re just not,” his mother said.
Rory McIlroy with his parents, Rosie and Gerry, at the Hero Dubai Desert Classic last year. getty images
Rory has talked about how seldom his parents saw one another as they worked their shifts in the name of their only child’s junior-golf career, one that took him to India, China, Europe, all over the British Isles and the United States. Raising a prodigy has its costs, financial and otherwise.
Gerry stopped talking to reporters years ago and McIlroy’s caddie and boyhood friend, Harry Diamond, does not either. The McIlroy parents are sort of the opposite of Phil Mickelson’s parents. The senior Phil Mickelson is modest and quiet, and there’s not a bit of showman in him. The golfer’s mother, Mary, lights up rooms. You can see elements of Rosie and Gerry in their son.
When McIlroy talks about Augusta National, it is clear how he appreciates the rounds he has played there with his father. You need a host to play Augusta National (even as a Masters winner) and the father and son have a good friend who is a member there, Jimmy Dunne, a son of Ireland if ever there was one. Dunne is also the president of Seminole Golf Club; he invited Gerry to join the club, which he did. Father and son play as a team in the club’s annual pro-member event. There’s a true playfulness between the two of them, and Rory will tell you that one of the most significant events in the family’s life in the past decade or so has been his father’s decision to quit smoking.
The PGA Championship next month is at Quail Hollow in Charlotte, where McIlroy has won. The U.S. Open is at Oakmont near Pittsburgh, which is Augusta National on steroids. (When you’re good at golf, the harder the course, the better.) The British Open is at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland — a winding one-hour drive from Holywood. Rory McIlroy’s parents have a TV. One way or another, they will be watching.
Michael Bamberger writes for GOLF Magazine and GOLF.com. Before that, he spent nearly 23 years as senior writer for Sports Illustrated. After college, he worked as a newspaper reporter, first for the (Martha’s) Vineyard Gazette, later for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He has written a variety of books about golf and other subjects, the most recent of which is The Second Life of Tiger Woods. His magazine work has been featured in multiple editions of The Best American Sports Writing. He holds a U.S. patent on The E-Club, a utility golf club. In 2016, he was given the Donald Ross Award by the American Society of Golf Course Architects, the organization’s highest honor.
