What's the matter with Rory? He's a bum!
Or, is he just remarkably unlucky and still who we think he is?
(For those who don’t recognize it, the headline here is a play on something baseball fans - at least, San Francisco Giants fans - yell at opposing players. Rory McIlroy is in no definitional way a bum, but the question of what’s the matter with him is very real. Proceed.)
It must be tough to finish with top-10 performances in seven of the last eight majors and be considered in some regards a failure. But this is life for Rory McIlroy. When it comes to golf legacies, major tournaments are what truly matters – and Rors has four of them, which is incredibly impressive. There are only 20 professional golfers with more than this – but that’s enough to make an argument JUST on major wins that Rory isn’t one of the greatest golfers of all time.
The eye test suggests he’s certainly talented enough to be there, and his record since his last major win in 2014 might suggest that he’s been remarkably unlucky. From 2015-2023, Rory has 20 top-10’s in majors out of 34 majors played (he didn’t enter one and one was cancelled due to COVID). That’s … preposterously good.
Just take a look at that and note that McIlroy has at least a top-10 finish in a major in every single year he’s been a professional. And the last two years … my lord.
But the eye test tells us some other things – one, that some of these top-10 finishes were “Wikipedia top-10’s” meaning that sure, we see the yellow box but was Rory really in the mix? Yes and no. His 2nd place at the 2022 Masters was fairly fraudulent – it required him going low on Sunday when he started the day totally out of the mix, holing out on the 18th hole and then watching as Scottie Scheffler coasted to an easy victory. But others are legit contention performances such as his finishes in St Andrews or Los Angeles Country Club. But in those cases, he just couldn’t close the deal. In others, he just got beat by someone having an even better week.
These things happen and it’s why golf is so fascinating. It’s rare that someone like Tiger Woods is just simply that much better than literally everyone else in the field. And hey, even Tiger got beat by some folks, some times.
On the No Laying Up recap of The Open, Soly cited DataGolf which shows expected major wins for a given golfer. One would assume that the data suggests Rory should have won a few of these, so I guessed his expected major wins would be something like 6 or 7. They are 4.3, which rounds down to four, what he actually has. I don’t know the math behind this – assume it means he might have gotten lucky with a few of the majors he does have, should have won a few others but either way … maybe Rory hasn’t gotten truly unlucky?
When I look back at recent years, it often feels like he’s gotten conservative on Sundays – playing prevent defense when he needs to go on the attack. He’s one of the most lethal drivers of the golf ball and at St. Andrews, he hit almost every single green in regulation but just never made a birdie when it counted. There are many historical majors when that would have won it for him as he started the day in the lead – but Cam Smith had something else to say about it, playing aggressively and just taking the tropy for himself. So did Cameron Young. When you start the day in first place and hit almost every green and somehow don’t even finish in second place, that’s some shocking stuff.
At this point, it’s got to be haunting for Rory and something has to change. This past weekend, on Saturday he had a chance to put a ton of pressure on Brian Harman who the prior day had boatraced the field and perhaps built an unbreakable lead. But with Jon Rahm starting the day with a 63, if Rory had just made ANY putts, Harman would have felt it. The amount of times Rory was just baffled by a SHORT putt that didn’t come close to dropping was truly distressing. Folks have noted that Rory rarely if ever has his caddie, friend Harry Diamond, read putts for him as many golfers do. That’s not a reflection on Diamond, it’s on Rory.
It's worth taking a breath here to praise Harman who absolutely shut the door on guys like Rory, Rahm, Jason Day and others. Sometimes in golf you can have an incredible weekend and just get beat by someone having an even better one. But as much as Harman didn’t break, I think if Rory had come up and tied him on Saturday – something that should have been possible if he’d made any reasonable amount of putts – the math could have changed.
But I’m not here to tell McIlroy how to fix his woes. I don’t think any reasonable golf fan – even those who claim Rory “stinks” because he hasn’t won a major in so long – would think that he’s not one of the best golfers in the world, and has been for years. But when the pressure is the highest, of late Rory hasn’t sealed the deal. At all. And that reflects on him in a way that means he’s truly NOT one of the elite golfers in the world right now when you look at the entire picture.
This discussion – which has been going on for way too long now – led me to create a “Golfer Ranking” document. It divides golfers into tiers, and of course is fairly fluid. I’ll be posting it at some point in the future and the document is, of course, quite fluid. (When I started it, Brooks Koepka was very much NOT in the top tier and Cam Smith was. This has changed, as a mild spoiler.)
As a fan of both golf and McIlroy, I think nothing could be better for the sport than Rory winning in Augusta next April to complete golf’s Grand Slam and getting this monkey gorilla off his back. I’ll be cheering for him when and if this happens, and I feel fairly confident that one way or another, he’s going to win another major – but I sure hope it happens soon, because time isn’t infinite and it’s starting to feel like a missed window.