Rory, Geoffrey and the unrepeatable moment

Two days, almost fifty years apart, with something in common...

Rory McIlroy’s Twitter bio used to say, ‘hits a little white ball around a field sometimes.’ Its lightness was belied by the image of McIlroy last Sunday on the eighteenth green of Augusta National, a field long part of golf’s dreamscape. He was on his knees, arms clutched around his head, sobbing. His final putt had, tremulously, at last, hit the bottom of the cup. It was over.

Winning the Masters had been his ambition since he was seven years old. The ambition had taken on a darker hue once he had won all three of golf’s other Major titles by the age of 25. Now it was just the Masters separating him from the only other five people to have achieved the career Grand Slam. It had been eleven – or was it fourteen, he couldn’t really decide – years of uncertainty and psychological warfare with himself and with the world as he tried and failed to join that club.

The Masters is a strange tournament. It’s the only one of golf’s Majors that is played on the same course each year. It has a small field of players invited by the committee of a private club and the criteria are somewhat idiosyncratic. Past champions have a lifetime exemption and are relied upon to know when they are no longer able to get around the course in a competitive manner (Bernhard Langer, champion in 1985 and 1993, hung it up this year at the age of 67, having just missed the cut; others have been less accepting and acceptable). There are up to six amateurs in the field, plus anyone who has won a Major championship within the last five years – a list that includes such household names as Brian Harman and Wyndham Clark.

All of this means that before the Masters tees off, at least half of the field know that they can’t win, and perhaps only fifteen to twenty players have a genuine chance. It is a long and difficult golf course with steep hills and swirling greens that become almost frictionless under the sun and the sub-air drainage system installed beneath them: putting on them has been likened to putting downhill on glass. The final day pin positions are so familiar that most casual fans can plot on them on the card, and they are set up to produce the violent swings between triumph and disaster upon which the tournament has made its reputation.

Some of the most famous collapses in the history of sport have happened out there beside the impossibly blue water, amongst manicured pines and dogwood blooms. One of those belongs to Rory McIlroy. In 2011, he opened with rounds of 65, 69 and 70 to lead by four strokes going into Sunday. He began edgily, dropping a couple of shots on the front nine as others charged. Charl Schwartzel barely needed his putter on the opening holes, chipping in at the first and then holing his approach to the third. He was now just a shot back, alongside the domineering Argentinian former champion Angel Cabrera, playing in the final group with McIlroy, and the biggest dog of them all, Tiger Woods, who had made four birdies and an eagle as he powered up the leaderboard.

McIlroy discovered the truth of the old maxim that the tournament doesn’t really begin until the back nine on Sunday, and for him it barely began at all. He duck-hooked his tee shot at the tenth, a hole that requires a high and sweeping draw for perfect position, and then pitched into a tree on his way to a triple bogey seven. He bogeyed eleven, traditionally the toughest hole on the course, and then four putted the tiny twelfth green. It was over. He signed for an 80 and fifteenth place.

From then until now was the fourteen year span McIlroy referred to on Sunday. The eleven years he also mentioned represented the amount of time since he’d recorded his fourth and apparently final Major win at the USPGA in 2014, the same summer in which he’d landed the Open Championship and sparked talk of a new era in world golf.

Post 2014, his results at the Masters read: Tied 40, T25, T8, 4, T10, T7, T5, T21, T5, Missed Cut, 2, Missed Cut, T22. He’d tried everything. Playing the week beforehand. Not playing the week beforehand. Acknowledging to himself how much it would mean to win. Pretending it was just another tournament. Having his family around. Not having his family around. Changing his game. Not changing his game. None of it worked. He was dogged by 2011, stymied by the expectation. He hadn’t just not won the Masters, he’d stopped winning all the other Majors, too. He had excruciating experiences at the Open Championship in 2022, when he was the co-leader going into the final round and fell away to finish third without ever really challenging, and at the US Open in 2024, where he led the tournament with four holes remaining only to miss from two feet for par on the 16th hole and and from three feet on the final green to lose by a shot to Bryson DeChambeau.

It seemed soul-destroying and absurd. McIlroy was winning everything else: four Fed Ex Cups, the season-ending shoot outs that came with a ridiculous payout of $18m, and any number of other tournaments around the world, just not the ones that would add to his legacy, ensure his reputation as a great of the game.

Going into the Masters this year, there was an air of fatality to it all. He was getting older. The scars from all of that defeat had marked him. In Majors, people now expected him to lose, not win. And every year at Augusta, the same narrative: somehow get this one and join the golfing immortals. It seemed like a kind of mental cruelty to keep going on about it, but everyone did. This time, he was using the psychologist Bob Rotella, he had agreed to watch Bridgerton with his wife and he’d brought along a novel to read, John Grisham’s The Reckoning, a book with an ominously relevant title.

Maybe all of that would work.

Cricketers love golf. It’s perhaps the closest sport to what they do in terms of the time it takes and the fine motor skills and hand-eye co-ordination that it requires. But it can never be quite the same, even in their most individual of team sports. As the Masters weekend unfolded, I was trying to think of a moment that might be similar in terms of the pressure, self-imposed and external, under which Rory McIlroy operated.

The Summer of 1977. England versus Australia for the Ashes. Geoffrey Boycott has been in self-imposed exile from international cricket since 1974. The reasons are myriad and complex. The reasons are simple and obvious. Boycott is emotional and highly-strung. Boycott is difficult and pragmatic. He is utterly devoted to the art of batting. He has a deep-seated and far-reaching hatred of failure that is far from ideal when the act by which he defines himself involves failure on a consistent basis.

Things have changed in the three years of exile. Boycott has just turned down an approach from Kerry Packer and Tony Greig to join something called World Series Cricket. Alec Bedser, head of selectors, calls and asks if he’d be willing to talk. They meet on neutral territory at the Watford Gap services on the M1. They speak in Bedser’s car. Boycott says he is worried he may be snubbed by the selectors if he makes himself available. Bedser says he will talk to the panel. Boycott consults his Yorkshire team-mates. Some tell him to go. Others ask him to stay. He knows it’s now or never. He makes himself available.

England bring him back for the Third Test of the series at Trent Bridge. Ian Botham is selected to make his debut. Boycott had made his debut at Trent Bridge too, many years ago now. He’s nervous but delighted by the warmth of his welcome from both the players and the crowd. Hundreds throng the nets to watch him practice. The groundsman Ron Alsopp says that Geoffrey always makes runs on his pitches. He’s as nervous as he’s ever been.

Boycott goes in towards the end of day one after Botham has taken five on debut. The next morning, still there and still nervous, he runs out Derek Randall, the local hero. He feels sick to his stomach but he overcomes that and plays what he still thinks of as the best innings of his career, simply because of the pressure: 107, and then 80 not out in the second dig for good measure. The hundred is his 98th in first-class cricket.

He goes to Edgbaston to play for Yorkshire against Warwickshire and makes another hundred. Rachael, then his girlfriend and now his wife, rings and says, “you’ve done it now.”

“Done what,” he says, and she says, “the television and radio says you’re going to get your hundredth hundred in the Test match at Headingley.”

Boycott doesn’t usually swear but now he does: “Do you know how difficult it is to get a fucking hundred, let alone in a fucking Test match, and against Australia, and on my home fucking ground…”

But sport loves narrative, loves a story, demands it, consumes it. Only sixteen players in the history of cricket have scored one hundred first-class centuries, including WG Grace, Jack Hobbs and Don Bradman. None of them have scored their one hundredth in a Test match, let alone an Ashes Test on their home ground. But Boycott has that chance, and it will only come around once.

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The pressure is ridiculous, and so is the expectation. Even a great century maker like Boycott can’t produce one to order. If he could his life would be a lot easier than it is in the madness of the build-up. He doesn’t sleep the night before the game so he takes a sleeping tablet and wakes up late. He takes a cab to the ground and the cab driver tells him, “I had two of your mates in here yesterday, Lillee and Thommo, and they said they’re going to knock your fucking block off.”

He prays that Mike Brearley will lose the toss but he doesn’t, and England bat first. Unusually, as they walk out, Brearley asks if he can take first ball, and Boycott says fine. Brearley is dismissed by the third delivery of the day. It wakes Boycott up. He realises the sun is out and the wicket is hard and true. After half an hour his feet are moving and the ball is hitting the middle of his bat. Lenny Pascoe bowls him a quick, lifting delivery that brushes his wristband. The Aussies go up but Lloyd Budd gives it not out.

Deep in the afternoon when he has made 75, he is facing Ray Bright, who bowls an arm ball that Boycott tries to glance and misses. It brushes his thigh pad and the Aussies go up again. Not out says Bill Alley and Ray Bright makes a show of himself, stomping around until he is admonished by Alley.

He spends a long time in the 80s not scoring and the crowd gets edgy, but he has been in the eighties so often he knows that the fielders get closer and the bowling gets tighter in the hope that nerves will kick in and he’ll do something stupid, destroy himself, so he simply defends and waits it out.

The clock ticks around towards six. Boycott has edged to 96, within one shot of his dream. One shot, after all of those runs, all of this life. One shot to do it here and now like no-one else, and the chance will never come again. Greg Chappell brings himself on to bowl his medium pace in the hope that Boycott will relax too much and fail at the last. Boycott knows this. He tells himself to hit the gap at extra cover or on the on side if he gets the opportunity.

Chappell runs in. “As soon as the ball left his hand,” Boycott said, “I knew I was going to hit it and I knew where it was going… As soon as I middled it, I raised my bat in the air… It was the greatest moment in my cricketing career.”

The crowd spills on the pitch and play is held up for more than five minutes. At the close, on the players’ balcony, he has a glass of champagne thrust into his hand and the BBC camera in his face.

“It’s a miracle really,” he says, live on TV. “I didn’t believe it could happen, but it has.”

                                                                        ***

Rory McIlroy was more than a decade away from being born when Boycott struck that immortal on-drive, but last Sunday he could surely relate.

He didn’t sleep much either. Augusta is not what they call a ‘catch-up’ golf course. It’s too difficult to make up lots of shots, and so those that play well in the first round generally stay near the top of the leaderboard for the rest of the week. Conversely, a poor first round usually dooms its compiler before he’s really got started. It has happened too often to Rory McIlroy for him to rest easily now.

But this season is different. For the first time, McIlroy has won twice before Augusta, both prestigious titles, the Pebble Beach Pro-Am and the Players Championship, a tournament often called the fifth major due to the strength of its field and the difficulty of the Sawgrass layout where it is held. He is in better form than anyone else in world golf.

As he reaches the par-five fifteenth hole, he is four under the card and playing dreamily. He hits his second from an elevated position at the top of the hill over the water and through the back of the green towards the pond that separates the fifthteenth and sixteenth holes. He is not the first to overshoot here. What he and many of the players haven’t accounted for is that the fifteenth green has been relaid after hurricane Helene caused extensive damage to the course over the winter and it is not as receptive as some of the more established surfaces.

He catches his chip thin and the ball takes a hard first bounce on the new green, gathers pace across the slope and rolls into the water. That costs him two shots. Another two disappear with a double bogey at seventeen and he signs for a round of even par 72, seven shots behind the leader Justin Rose.

No-one has ever won the Masters with more than three double bogeys on their card. McIlroy already has two. Augusta is not a catch up course. He is seven shots back. It’s over again in the blink of an eye.

Bob Rotella tells him not to try and get the shots back too quickly. In the second round he starts the back nine with four consecutive threes and takes 66. Rose shoots even par and so McIlroy is only two shots behind. It’s just the third time in a decade that he has been inside the top five going into the weekend.

On Saturday he plays golf from the gods. His opening tee shot goes 371 yards and flies the bunker that guards the steep uphill fairway. No-one ever flies that bunker. He makes birdie. On the par five second, eagle. On the par four third, another birdie. On the fourth, a par three, he makes three again. On the fifth, a par four that requires a pinpoint drive to a cambered fairway lined by deep bunkers along its left hand side, he threads the needle for a birdie. The sixth is another par three with a multi-level green where he makes par again and takes a four shot lead over the field, a lead that stands at two once the round is complete.

Somehow he is back in a tournament in which no-one takes more than three double bogeys and wins and no-one catches up to win. He doesn’t sleep. He’s seen a few episodes of Bridgerton and has reached chapter six of The Reckoning. He watches a Disney film with his four year old daughter.

For the final round he is paired with Bryson DeChambeau, who had beaten him at the US Open after he missed that short putt on the final green. DeChambeau is an unconventional player, one of the few who can on occasion hit a golf ball further than McIlroy. He loves the crowd, loves the attention, loves being in the final group of a Major championship.

McIlroy tries to fly the bunker again on the first, but the tee has been set a few yards back and his drive catches the furthest lip and rolls back in. From there, he overshoots the green, duffs his chip and double bogeys the first. The lead is gone already. On the second he tries to fly the fairway bunker, again catches the top lip and has to lay up. He misses the birdie putt, DeChambeau nails his and after two holes leads by one.

The next four hours are insane, magical, compelling. Augusta is an equivocal place with a dubious history but it is built for theatre like this. McIlroy regains the lead and then pulls away towards the middle of the round, at one point ahead by four. DeChambeau tries and tries but he doesn’t have his best stuff. In truth his tournament has been one of miraculous recovery and rock solid up and downs and in the heat of Sunday, he is visiting the well too often. Instead, it’s another one of Augusta’s nearly men, the Englishman Justin Rose, who is tearing the course up en route to ten birdies in eighteen holes.

The eleventh offers a thin funnel for the players to drive through. Go too far right and you’ll be in the trees, hitting downhill off of pine straw to a green that runs away from the eye and with a pond along its left hand edge. Go too far left and bushes block out the target. Anyone listening to the commentary will hear many times each tournament the words of Ben Hogan: “if you see me on the eleventh green in two, I’ve pulled my approach shot.” Right of the green where there is plenty of room to pitch up towards the pin is the play.

McIlroy flares his drive into the trees, decides to go for it through a narrow gap and hits a low hook that takes a bad bounce towards the pond. By some miracle it stops on the last gentle upslope before the drop. DeChambeau is not so lucky. He over-hooks his approach into the water, his tournament done.

Rory pars the twelfth, an impossibly pretty par three where so many dreams have died, players lured into going for a pin placed above a sharp slope that leads back down to water. Whisper it, but McIlroy should win from here. He has the two par fives ahead, holes that he has dominated over the years and that usually prove decisive for the victor.

His drive on thirteen goes right and lands on an awkward side slope. With a lead to protect, the sensible shot is a lay-up in front of Rae’s Creek, a decent chip and then a putt for birdie. McIlroy doesn’t usually do sensible but today he does, and the lay-up is perfect, offering a straightforward chip across the green and down to the pin, aided by the slope.

Instead, he duffs the chip into the creek and writes yet another double bogey on his card. No-one has won the Masters with more than three, and that has only happened once in almost ninety years. He now has four. He drops another shot on the fourteenth and from four ahead is now in a three way tie for the lead with Rose and Ludwig Aberg, a lissom Swede who is many canny observers’ tip as a future Masters champion.

He hits a powerful drive at fifteen, but overdraws it by no more than a couple of yards and is partially blocked out by overhanging branches. His response is one of awesome competitive courage. He takes a seven iron and hits a towering hook that swings out far to the right before, impossibly, turning in mid air as it sails across the water and lands like a kiss on that rock-hard green, seven or eight feet from the pin.

This, surely, is the moment he knows he can win. Augusta has destroyed him before, but this year he has responded to every setback, and when he most needed his best, he found it. He misses the eagle putt but lands the birdie. He pars sixteen and then hits another stunning iron into seventeen to leave a three foot tickler which he converts to take the lead once again. He is one par away from the Masters. Rose, once again praying that he is not simply the foil, is on the range warming up for what he hopes will be a play off should McIlroy fail.

The drive on eighteen is a pivotal shot. Left are some dense bushes that leave only a chip out, while the trees up the right often block out a clean approach. Get it right though, and whack it up the hill by the big bunker Sandy Lyle played out of when he won, and the remaining shots are, for Augusta, straightforward. Hit a wedge into the green’s central tier and the slope will take the ball back down to the Sunday pin. From there, two putts and it’s done.

McIlroy nails his drive to Position A. Surely this time… but no. He pushes his second weakly into the greenside bunker, blasts out and misses a four footer by a couple of dimples to the left.

Can he take any more of this? Can anyone? It was exhausting, all of the hope and the despair. If he didn’t win now he surely never would, the scars will run too deep even for him.

Rose has been here before, losing a play-off to Sergio Garcia in 2017. The Spaniard was another player whose early promise had soured. His cathartic first and almost certainly only Major came at his 74th attempt. Rose at least had one in the bag, the 2013 US Open, and he was an Olympic champion who had won numerous Ryder Cups with Europe. He wanted the jacket as badly as McIlroy, and he had just played the round of his life to get it: 66 to McIlroy’s 73.

The play-off is sudden death, scheduled to take place on the eighteenth hole. If the players are level after that, they will go to the tenth and so on until a winner emerges. McIlroy hits his drive to the almost identical spot he had found a few moments earlier. Rose’s hugs the right hand side but leaves a clear shot to the green. Rose plays a fine second and is unlucky not to catch the belly of the slope, which would have brought him closer than the ten or so feet away that he finds himself. McIlroy hits a gap wedge to the perfect spot, the ball rolling back to what is surely an unmissable distance from the hole.

At this point anyone who hasn’t fainted is doing well. Rose hits an excellent putt inches to the right of the hole. Outwardly he appears to accept his fate. He knows, surely, that he is in the bad guy role here, as undeserving as that sounds.

McIlroy steps up. His putt is unmissable except it is almost exactly the length he did miss to allow DeChambeau the US Open. And these holes at Augusta are knowingly placed. Rose’s putt looked as though it must move left at the end but somehow it straightened out. McIlroy pulls the putter back, then forwards. The ball doesn’t seem to have much on it but it keeps going, bobbling a little until it falls below ground.

A day later, Rory McIlroy changed his Twitter/X bio. Now it says, ‘Grand Slam winner.’ Beneath a picture of himself in the green jacket, he wrote, ‘dreams do come true’.