The post What does Rory McIlroy have after dream season? 1 big ambition appeared first on Golf.

The post What does Rory McIlroy have after dream season? 1 big ambition appeared first on Golf.

Rory McIlroy’s PGA Tour year started with a triumphant walk down the 18th fairway at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, where he uttered a prescient message to caddie Harry Diamond.

“Start as you mean to go on,” McIlroy said, en route to winning that week.

McIlroy then won the Players before completing the career Grand Slam at the Masters. A period of malaise engulfed his summer before a home Open at Royal Portrush sparked a finishing flurry to a “dream” season that included an Irish Open win, an away Ryder Cup victory and a BBC Sports Personality of the Year trophy.

This year has had almost everything for McIlroy, who has had to grapple with an existential question now for months: What’s next?

That question lorded over his summer, but by the time the Open rolled around, McIlroy had seemingly found a way to enjoy a dream come true while repositioning himself for the rest of his professional career. The goal and focus for the next stage of Rory McIlroy’s career is to win the tournaments that matter at the places that matter. The rest is the rest.

Over the weekend, McIlroy won another award, taking home his third RTE Sportsperson of the Year Award and looked toward the future while acknowledging a hard truth about life after a season that had everything he wanted.

“You know, I think mentally, I have to be comfortable with maybe this is going to be my best year ever,” McIlroy told RTE after accepting the award. “Who knows? I hope it’s not, you know. I hope I still have many more great years ahead of me. But you know, no matter what I do going forward, I’m only ever going to be able to win my first Masters once. And I really enjoyed that. 

“And I’ve relished the opportunity to bring the green jacket around the world and show it off. It’s been a wonderful year, but I still think that I’ve got a lot more to achieve. So I’m still ambitious.”

After a subpar performance at the U.S. Open at Oakmont, McIlroy said he was working to find a new mountain to climb. A home Open at Royal Portrush was an easy one, but there will be more to come. After checking the Masters and an away Ryder Cup off his career to-do list, one mountain looms larger than the others.

“I think at this part of my career, I’m looking for those, you know, big tournaments and massive moments,” McIlroy said. “Major championships in golf are one of those. Ryder Cups. And then, you know, obviously the Olympics. I’ve had a taste of two Olympic Games now, Tokyo and Paris, and I’ve been pretty close to getting a medal both times. So 2028 in LA I’d love to give myself another chance to get on that podium and bring a medal back to Ireland.”

As McIlroy looks toward the next phase of his career, he is drawing inspiration from the man who battled with him for the green jacket in April.

“I was really inspired by what Justin Rose did at Memphis this year,” McIlroy said at the DP World Tour Championship. “And then what he did at the Ryder Cup. And I look at what he does, you know, to play at this level at 45 years of age. I’d love to be able to say — I hopefully will be able to do the same thing in 10 years’ time.”

Rose has called this stage of his career an “Indian Summer.” He’s unsure of how long it will last, but he has carded two runner-up finishes in the last five majors, won the FedEx St. Jude in Memphis this year and was once again a key cog in a European Ryder Cup victory. Rose has poured everything into keeping his game sharp and his body healthy.

It’s easy to forget that Rory McIlroy has been doing this at this level for almost two decades. His game has had tiny ebbs and flows, but Rory McIlroy has been Rory McIlroy for almost 20 straight years. It’s an impressive feat that often gets lost in the daily discourse around golf’s current needle.

“You look at what [Novak] Djokovic is doing at Wimbledon over the last couple weeks,” McIlroy said at the Genesis Scottish Open in July, “or what some of those guys have done or what someone like a Cristiano Ronaldo is still doing at 40 years old, or Tom Brady in American football; that longevity piece is something that maybe isn’t talked about enough.

“Because once you get to a certain level, I feel like the journey on the way up is almost — it’s not — I’m not going to say it’s easy, but you have momentum and you’re riding that wave to the top. And then once you get there, yeah, it takes just as much work, if not more work, to stay there. Because I think about my career before I won this major this year, the last major I won in 2014, I had never heard of Scottie Scheffler.”

McIlroy’s goal is to keep being this Rory McIlroy for another 10 to 15 years. To do that, he knows changes are needed to stay fresh and not get beaten down by time.

“I think if I want to play another 10 years at the highest level,” McIlroy said at the DP World Tour Championship, “then, yeah, I’m gonna have to scale back my schedule so that — you know, it’s a weird one — I want to play less every year to play more into the future, you know?”

Trimming down the schedule fits with McIlroy’s vision to focus only on big tournaments, big moments, iconic courses and global golf.

After a dream year that included an existential search in the middle, McIlroy knows what’s on the horizon and has a plan for how to get there. Nothing might ever top his 2025, but McIlroy is no longer searching for what comes next. He has a clear vision for what life after a dream season looks like and, as it turns out, it’s not all that different from life before — the mountains he plans to climb are different, but the vision is no less grand.

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The post Talor Gooch: Why Rory McIlroy Masters win would warrant asterisk appeared first on Golf.

The post Talor Gooch: Why Rory McIlroy Masters win would warrant asterisk appeared first on Golf.

Last week, LIV Golf’s Joaquin Niemann got a special invitation to the Masters, which inevitably snowballed into who hasn’t received a ticket to Augusta National.

Talor Gooch won three of LIV Golf’s 13 events last season but didn’t receive the same treatment as Niemann (Thorbjorn Olesen and Ryo Hisatsune were also invited, although they aren’t LIV golfers), which has led to the latest round of uproar over both the Official World Golf Ranking’s refusal to award LIV Golf World Ranking points and professional golf as a whole for its inability to figure out a solution in the meantime.

Speaking to Australian Golf Digest, Gooch said he’s not surprised he hasn’t received an invite and added that history should take note of the absence of top players at Augusta.

“If Rory McIlroy goes and completes his grand slam without some of the best players in the world, there’s just going to be an asterisk,” Gooch said. “It’s just the reality. I think everybody wins whenever the majors figure out a way to get the best players in the world there.”

It’s unclear why Gooch called out McIlroy specifically, or if McIlroy was perhaps brought up in the question given this April he’ll again chase the career grand slam, which he can achieve if he wins the Masters and will no doubt again be one of the tournament’s key storylines. It’s also unclear if Gooch was talking about himself, or other players he feels are being left out. (Gooch has played in 11 majors in his career. He’s missed four cuts and has yet to record a top 10.)

Gooch’s talent is certainly Masters-worthy, despite his No. 449 World rank. But Gooch (and others) knew what they’d signed up for when they joined LIV Golf and the uncertain future of those precious World Ranking points.

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It’s also worth noting that the Masters field will still be stacked this year. Many of LIV’s top players are already exempt — Jon Rahm, Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, Cameron Smith, Tyrrell Hatton and Patrick Reed, to name a handful — meaning there aren’t as many obvious omissions as it might seem, especially for the major with the smallest field.

“I think the majors have kind of shown that they’re not getting on board with LIV,” Gooch said. “Jaco went outside of LIV and played some great golf and they rewarded him for that. So, hopefully, the day will turn when the majors decide to start rewarding good play on LIV. Hopefully, that’ll be sooner than later.”

While it might seem odd that Niemann, who won LIV Golf’s Mayakoba event earlier this month, got an invite and Gooch did not, there is some important context here. Augusta said the invite was reserved for international players who are not already qualified. Plus, Niemann won the Australian Open in December, and while Augusta National’s press release announcing the special invites did not mention Niemann’s recent LIV victory, it did include his Latin America Amateur win in 2018. That’s notable because that tournament is organized by Augusta National, with the winner awarded a Masters invite. With Augusta inviting Niemann, it’s paying homage to a past winner of an event that’s important to the club’s grassroots initiatives.

“I think it’s up to the majors now to have some sort of exemption criteria for the LIV tour,” Marc Leishman told Australian Golf Digest. “The PGA Tour has its top 30 get in the majors (those who qualify for the Tour Championship). Maybe LIV can get its top 12 at season’s end, given the smaller fields and all that.”

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The post GOLF’s Subpar: How this pro nearly lost $3k in a fast-food bag appeared first on Golf.

The post GOLF’s Subpar: How this pro nearly lost $3k in a fast-food bag appeared first on Golf.

Subpar’s Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz are joined by PGA Tour pro Bud Cauley who explains how he nearly lost $3000 cash he had in a fast-food bag.

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The post GOLF’s Subpar: How this pro nearly lost $3k in a fast-food bag appeared first on Golf.