‘...I do thrive on challenges’: Rory McIlroy sets upon Masters with history in his sights

If Masters mania has dominated Rory McIlroy's professional life since securing the US PGA Championship eight months ago, then the origins of his affinity with Augusta National pre-date that by quite some distance.

Georgia has long been on his mind. Eighteen years, in fact.

“I watched Tiger’s amazing 12-shot victory at the 1997 Masters and was completely blown away,” says McIlroy, who arrives this week at the season’s first major looking to make his own entry in the history books.

Slip into the green jacket on Sunday and he will become only the third male golfer, after Woods and Jack Nicklaus, to win all four of the game’s major titles, the “career grand slam” – before his 26th birthday. Presumably, Tiger torching it in 1997 would seem light years away.

“I was with my dad and we sat shaking our heads at the ability of this relatively unknown, young guy,” McIlroy says. “I said in an interview recently that, for me, this was the dawning of golf’s new era, even though I couldn’t quite put it into words then.”

Little wonder. McIlroy may have already been proficient with driver and putter back then, but he was still three weeks shy of his eighth birthday. Nevertheless, the sight of defending champion Nick Faldo anointing his successor, and thus honour a Masters tradition, remains etched in McIlroy’s mind. So, too, does the resolve to one day follow suit.

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“It was so special,” he says. “Because I honestly remember Faldo putting on Tiger’s green jacket and saying to myself: ‘I need to do this. I want to do this. I’m going to get to work on it’.”

He did just that. The intervening years have perhaps flashed by, yet McIlroy’s position at the head of the sport, at age 25, is as clear as an Augustan spring. The Northern Irishman not only drives down Magnolia Lane with a substantial lead in the world rankings, but also as hoarder of the past two major trophies, a four-time major champion in all, and as the only guy in the field able to emulate the quintet to have captured golf’s most-coveted quartet. Sarazen, Hogan, Nicklaus, Player, Woods: it constitutes a pretty luminous list.

So the spotlight burns bright. McIlroy, by now adept at life-in-the-lens, and having experienced eight months of probing since that final putt dropped in the dark at Valhalla, concedes the scene awaiting him on the first tee on Thursday “will be a little on the lively side”. Onus, though, could be recast a bonus.

“I see it as a great opportunity and really have to set out to try and get the job done,” he says. “I’m very excited and looking forward to the task ahead, and I’ll just have to accept that there’ll be an intense amount of hype, as at all majors.

“It’s essentially what happens with the world No 1 position – there are the expectations that come with the territory.”

By now, Augusta National represents familiar territory. This week, McIlroy will make his seventh appearance there. Last year he recorded his best finish by coming home eighth, although he never really contended. Most say his game, a towering draw and considerable length off the tee, is perfectly suited to the Bobby Jones-Alister Mackenzie layout, but McIlroy’s total scorecard there has included 11 double bogeys, three triple bogeys and five rounds of 77 or worse.

The nadir was 2011. Possessing a four-shot lead heading into Sunday, McIlroy saw it disintegrate as he posted a final-round 80 and finished in a tie for 15th.

His capitulation, illustrated most vividly by the photograph of McIlroy surveying his second shot on 10 – 50 yards off compass and stranded between the cabins beyond the pines – was tough to contemplate, let alone confront.

Three shots dropped on that hole, mind frazzled, he three-putted the 11th and needed an extra one to get the job done on 12. “Everything’s going too fast,” he said afterwards. “But it’s hard to slow down without the experience.”

Yet the experience formed him; it forged McIlroy The Major Champion. Within two months, he had lapped the field at Congressional to win the US Open, the first of his four prized successes. That meltdown at the Masters is now viewed as the pivotal point of his professional development.

“I look back on that Sunday as something that is all part of a bigger picture in my golfing career,” McIlroy says. “I won’t shy away and say it didn’t matter because it did hurt at the time; nobody likes to throw away a lead, especially on Sunday afternoon at Augusta.

“Learning from it was the important part for me. Winning the US Open two months later allowed me to put the Masters into perspective. If I think back to then, I’d say that I was just in too much of a hurry to win. Perhaps I tried to force an outcome that required a little more patience.”

Patience could be hard to come by this week, as McIlroy attempts to take his place in golf’s pantheon. He has limited his time in the glare since last teeing it up at Bay Hill three weeks ago – he finished tied-11th on debut there – preferring instead to put in the yards at the Bear’s Club, near his Florida home at Jupiter.

However, the earth has still spun on McIlroy’s axis. Most recently, the world No 1 has been prominent in slick advertisements for various blue-chip sponsors – his Bose commercial begins with the line “Six weeks to Georgia” – not to mention on the front cover of non-golf-specific magazines, most noticeably Men’s Health and the New York Times’ Sunday supplement.

But to fulfil a dream stretching back 18 years, there is only one statement, fashion or otherwise, McIlroy wants to make come Sunday, amid the azaleas and the dogwoods. Save a seat in Butler Cabin, Bubba.

“Of course, putting on the green jacket would be an amazing experience,” he says. “And I’d love a wardrobe full of them. But I think that’s tempting fate a little. I’m up against around 100 other very capable guys who have similar designs on that same jacket. Being the world’s No 1 and attempting a career grand slam is a big ask and not without its pressures ... but I do thrive on the challenge.”

jmcauley@thenational.ae

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