McIlroy knows the feeling. He’s supported on every golf course he plays on, but it was never bigger than when the 2019 Open visited Northern Ireland, his home. He tensed up during the Thursday of that soggy week and hooked his first tee ball out of bounds — with an iron in hand — en route to a quadruple bogey. He shot 79 that day and basically ended his championship right there. When he made a ferocious sprint for the cutline with a Friday 65, they sang his name into the fading sunlight. It brought McIlroy to tears.
Just last week, TV cameras found Bob MacIntyre wiping tears from his eyes in the immediate moments after shooting 64 Sunday at his home Open, the Scottish. He made birdie on the toughest hole on the property and thought he had won. The crowd egged him on all afternoon. Even Mother Nature was as Scottish as could be, blowing 40 mph. At 14 under, it was all smiles in the scoring tent. Then McIlroy crashed the party.
“I was in so much control, [the crowd] wasn’t a problem,” MacIntyre recalled Thursday afternoon. “I remember the Old Course last year, coming down the stretch, needing pars to make the cut … That was probably the one time that I’ve really felt like the home crowd was getting to me because I was wanting it that bad that I felt almost like I was letting them down.”
Therein lies the crux of what remains for Fleetwood. It’s early. The first quarter is over, but the home fans are already feeling it. Fleetwood gets a 24-hour rest between rounds and then comes the second quarter. If it goes well, a longer break and then the third. It builds and builds. Pressure grows and grows. That’s what the 2019 Open was like after McIlroy’s missed cut. Northern Ireland’s favorite lad receded and Ireland’s best golfer stepped forward, chants of Ro-ry transforming easily into Low-ry. A few days later, Shane Lowry sang Irish folk songs up on a stage with his grandmother, back in his hometown of Clara, the Claret Jug in his hands.
An important result of all that home Open magic hangs just inside the front doors of the clubhouse at Royal Portrush: a halting watercolor painting of Lowry’s final approach into the 72nd hole. The scene is straight out of a golf movie we’ve all seen before. The navy wrap-around bleachers, the golden scoreboards, the international medley of flapping flags up top and the cameramen down below. The Irish boy won Northern Ireland’s Open, seemingly uniting an entire island in golf adoration, if only for a day. In the bottom right corner of that painting stand two men, one in a black-and-white speckled polo and the other in a blue jumper and red caddie bib. That was Tommy Fleetwood and Ian Finnis, of course, in the final pairing, remembering everything.
