by Justin Doyle
© G2 Rights 2014. All rights reserved.
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Publishers: Edward Adams and Jules Gammond for G2 Rights
First published in the UK in 2014 by G2 Rights,
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ISBN: 978-1-782811-30-5
eISBN: 978-1-782819-86-8
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Contents
Rory’s Driver!
Foreword by Tony Jacklin CBE
Introduction
Chapter 1: Splitting From Westy & Chubbs
Chapter 2: Irish Golf’s First World Number One
Chapter 3: Augusta – A Sobering Return
Chapter 4: Made in the USPGA
Chapter 5: Possessed
Chapter 6: Seve’s Miracle of Medinah
(2012 Ryder Cup Part 1)
Chapter 7: Rory Avoids Ryder Disqualification!
(2012 Ryder Cup Part 2)
Chapter 8: The Doldrums
Chapter 9: Court v Club v Country
Chapter 10: Waltzing Australia
Chapter 11: ‘Wozzilroy’
Chapter 12: The Split
Chapter 13: Hoylake Ahoy!
Chapter 14: Excellence
Chapter 15: From Eagles to Gleneagles
Rory’s Driver!
Belgium, March 2012
Dear Mr. Doyle,
I have read your book ‘Rory, His Story So Far’ with great interest and pleasure.
To be honest, before September last year I did notice Rory arriving on the golf scene but when watching golf on TV, I took more interest in Tiger Woods and at a later stage Lee Westwood. But even of those players I have never read any book or followed them via Facebook or Twitter.
Since September I am following ‘Rors’ in almost every manner. Why? During the KLM Open of 2011 I had the honour of being his dedicated chauffeur from Wednesday to Sunday. Although the playing schedule was terribly affected by the bad weather (rain and later thunderstorms), the organization did very well to manage the tournament over four days. This affected Rory’s plans to have dinner and a visit to Amsterdam for which he asked me for some advice I even checked restaurants.
What amazed me was how mature he was for 22 years of age and how down to earth he was in all ways. In fact with his cap on, he almost looked shy. I was impressed from day one and when reading your book everything was confirming my impression of Rory McIlroy. Obviously during our 15 minute drive to and from the hotel we did not have lengthy discussions! But only some exchange of remarks; as a driver you are expected not to interfere or ‘only talk when being talked to’. But the few remarks were pleasant and more than enough to have some impression.
I think ISM did a great job guiding and protecting Rory in a way that allowed him to grow up as a person he is now. Keeping him away from the media in his younger years was an appropriate thing to do. When you are at the age of Lee Westwood or Luke Donald then you can leave them to handle the media, not when you are in your early twenties.
Chapter 10 was well written: Controversies. Everybody is allowed to have his opinion and sometimes it is better to count to 10 before speaking out. I think Rory is still learning but instead of reacting in the media, more and more he lets his game of golf speak! I am looking forward to his encounters with Tiger and their meeting gave me great pleasure: their smiles on their face enjoying the game and having respect for each other.
Last but not least, I do not know whether you keep contact with Rory or his parents but whenever I see him on television, my family and me are proud to have met him.
Thank you very much for the creation of this book, hope there are many more to follow.
Kind regards,
Henri Vermeesch
Foreword
by Tony Jacklin CBE
Simply put, I see Rory McIlroy as a prince of a young man. He is intelligent; he seems to have a wonderful strength of mind and a clear sense of purpose. He always has time for people and, in terms of golfing ability, Rory has everything.
He is a tremendous tee-to-green player and is one of the best drivers of the ball I have seen – and believe me, I have seen a few. That combination of long and straight makes the game a lot easier for him and I see no reason why he cannot reach double figures in his quest for Major glory. Equally, if he looks after himself, I can see him completing the Grand Slam with a win at Augusta in the not too distant future.
People have, on occasion, made comparisons between Rory and myself. We both hail from the British Isles and left these shores to test ourselves in the States at an early age. We were both eager to learn at that stage and success visited us both pretty quickly. However, Rory inhabits a very different golfing environment to the one I found myself in back in the 1960s.
I was one of a small number of foreign players in the US and the Americans resented our presence and made life as difficult as they could for us. Of course, the likes of Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer were different and ready to take us on in a sporting fashion but Rory faced different challenges when he first went over the pond.
The US Tour is much more welcoming nowadays, with a third of its players coming from overseas, but the attention from the media and the pressure that brings with it are intense. As a talented lad, things were expected of Rory from the outset but he committed fully and chose to make his move to America permanent. That is something I should have done all those years ago so it is good to see him learning from the experiences of others.
Rory has achieved great things already and clearly has time on his side. I doubt very much, however, that he will be thinking that way. I can see he wants to get stuck in and take things as far as he can. He knows the ball is in his court, so to speak, and that he must stay hungry.
From what I hear, he seems to be surrounding himself with the right kind of people, the ones with his best interests at heart, and his father is rightly at the centre of that.
He has also learnt at a young age that he does not have to play every single week and seems to appreciate the need for balance in his life. He reminds me of Nicklaus in that way. Jack never risked burn-out because he took breaks from playing to raise his family and design a course or two.
By maintaining a similar balance Rory can hold on to his hunger, specifically target the Majors and hopefully cement his name in golf history.
As humans we are all vulnerable and mistakes or misjudgments can be made but, if Rory can stay free from injury and keep the fire in his belly, he has the world at his feet.
He has come along at the right time and, although you should never write of
f Tiger, Rory is more than capable of taking on his mantle and establishing a lasting dominance in this game we all love.
I wish this young and highly talented Northern Irishman every bit of luck in fulfilling his extraordinary potential.
Introduction
Before I began putting pen to paper on my first biography of Rory McIlroy, entitled ‘Rory – His Story So Far’, I ventured up to his home town of Holywood, just outside Belfast in Northern Ireland.
I wanted to get a feel for everything Rory. What he saw when he grew up in the area, what sort of golf course he trawled with his father as a boy, the local shops (and even the bars!) he would have frequented, and I also took in the local school he attended.
In actual fact, Sullivan Upper High School was one of my first ports of call, and on the day I travelled there I just missed meeting Rory himself! When I went into the school’s main hall it was still stuffy and very warm from a big welcome home party for him.
The school’s most famous and favourite son had just won his first major – the US Open. High above the rows and rows of (by now empty) seats were banners reading ‘Congratulations Rory’, and I cursed my luck that I had missed an opportunity to say hello.
A few days later, I began work on what eventually turned out to be a very proud assignment. In managing to get the legendary Gary Player to write the foreword, the icing topped the cake.
The book began with my referring to the abundance of holly trees which grow in a wooded area at Glenlyon, which is just 500 metres walk uphill off the town’s main street and so, rather appropriately, the name ‘Holywood’ was formed.
The picturesque golf course, which overlooks Belfast Harbour and its towering Harland & Wolffe cranes, is actually very tough looking and (for want of better words to describe ‘hilly’) very undulating.
H&W also served to remind us that this company gave much needed employment to many Northern Ireland families down through the decades. Rory’s grandfather even worked those famous Belfast docks which would later launch the ill-fated Titanic.
Rory’s family were directly affected by ‘The Troubles’. An uncle of his was murdered, and that turbulent time is probably an underlying reason why he has clearly distanced himself from England and Ireland – he is staunchly Northern Ireland.
This in mind, it was then time to concentrate on the all-important business of golf and Rory’s early days. His glittering early career was delved into, his time as an amateur at boys and youth level culminating in him becoming world champion at the Doral under-12s tournament in Florida.
His first European win as a pro in Dubai is remembered and proudly framed upstairs in the Holywood clubhouse. A memento of his first trip to the US Masters is also present on the wall with a famous yellow flag from a hole at Augusta that he eagled!
All the glorious details of his US Open win (as well as the trauma of his Masters meltdown) were covered and a book about anyone’s life would not be a complete, or a fair assessment, if controversies were not dealt with – and they were.
So akin to a doctor getting a sense of his patient’s wellbeing by observation, the trip north, as well as all the subsequent research, proved very worthwhile. Many pinpoint and accurate readings and predictions emanated from the start to the finish of that book.
Gary Player’s opening foreword was a case in point. When I was a kid, I worshipped this golfer simply because my father so admired him. Player was small and slim in stature and I loved his immaculate jet-black polo neck and slacks and his lighter coloured caps.
To have him write the foreword was a fantastic honour but what he said in his piece was even more apt and pertinent. He talked about the differences between golf in his time and now.
He talked about how golf, back then, was a means to earning a living for him and his family, in contrast to the modern age where there is so much money about; how the media were a big part of the close-knit golfing tour party, which is not the case today.
Today’s media, he said, are in search of salacious stories, and Rory would become all too aware of that. He would have to deal with all of this and a lot more pressure while still being expected to win majors consistently and become one of the best players in the game.
His final words were the most telling:
Rory, YOU have the game, now go out and show the world that you have the desire. Remember, ‘the harder you practise the luckier you get’.
I will refer back to those final words of Gary’s in a few moments but there were some sentiments of my own from the first book which were to prove correct – and others that were just a little off the mark!
The book went to press in November 2011 with the publishers receiving my completed manuscript by 1 October. On page 113, in the opening line of chapter nine ‘Root of the Problem’, I wrote:
If there is one major besides the US Open that Rory McIlroy seems destined to win, it is the USPGA.
Ten months later, and after playing in three preceding majors without any success, Rory did indeed win that USPGA. In fact, he won his second major with ease and by the exact same winning margin as his first major US Open triumph – eight shots.
Other notable things were talked about and came to pass. There was the question of his ‘patriotic allegiances’ towards either Team GB or Ireland which, just a few months into 2102, really took off in a huge way with the worldwide media.
The pressure Rory endured during that entire episode, until he finally made a decision in the summer of 2014, was immense. In fact it was so tough that Graeme McDowell pleaded with authorities to make the decision for Rory, citing the huge strain and effect.
In this book his wins, as well as the highs and lows of 2012 and 2014, will be dealt with. But sandwiched in between both of those seasons was a 2013 bereft of big successes and replaced by a total loss of top form.
So much so that Rory, for all his genius and God-given golf talents, had serious doubts whether he would ever reach the heady heights of major glory again. Be under no other illusions – 2013 was a very worrying time.
This period, which I cover in this book under the chapter entitled ‘The Doldrums’, left the sporting public with grave doubts about McIlroy’s merits as a future superstar of world golf.
There was no way he could emulate or eclipse the great Tiger Woods with his sudden downturn in top form. Suddenly, from the best from of his life to the worst, a wave of pessimism pervaded concerning Rory.
Accompanying that pessimism was a large scale feeling that he was now just a ‘good time Charlie’ enjoying and revelling in his romance with Caroline Wozniacki. Rory was making all the headlines off the course with very little to be said about him on it.
If it was not photographs or headlines of Rory in happy times at parties or away on holiday breaks with his beloved, then it was more worrying headlines of impending doom which made the news.
Missing cuts did not help his new multi million-dollar Nike contract and his switchover to using their clubs. As if the pressure of that was not bad enough, well known golfers were coming out in the media stating Rory had erred and could not get used to new clubs.
After leaving Chubby Chandler to join Horizon Sports Management (with whom he hit the ground running) and everything seeming so rosy in the garden, he then left them amid a legal dispute which looked likely to be settled in the highest courts in the land.
Everything golf related seemed to be crumbling and collapsing around him. His ‘blitzkrieg’ form that won him two majors by eight shots was nowhere to be seen; he was missing cuts, he was missing months – but worse, he was fun-loving away on holidays!
All of these were precise echoes of what Gary Player had talked of in his foreword - public and media scrutiny, intrusion, constant pressure and the need to practise hard and make huge sacrifices.
Just when it seemed as if he would be an ‘also-ran’, content, as Player said in his piece, ‘to settle for winning every once in a while’, he answered what Gary (and Jack Nicklaus and the golfing Gods)
had been seeking from Rory.
Off the golf course, and totally out of the blue, the need for ultimate sacrifice and hard practise was delivered by him in a most shocking and emphatic way to a worldwide audience.
It was THE building block he needed to single-handedly put in place a new construction of Rory Phase Two – and put it in place he did. Enjoy reading the story and reconstruction of an all new tower of strength.
Chapter 1
Splitting From Westy & Chubbs
After the highs and lows of 2011 – the US Open win which followed his US Masters meltdown – another whirlwind of a rollercoaster ride befell Rory at the end of that season and into 2012.
On the face of it, statistics may point to Rory McIlroy having a fantastic end to 2011. However, behind the facts of his unbelievably brilliant purple patch, lies a story of what might have been amid all the frustrating near misses.
Add to that the hectic end-of-season schedule of golf tournaments all over the world – the constant travelling, catching up on much needed sleep in jets and hotels, eating and drinking on the move – and a big crash of some sort was awaiting Rory around the bend.
Let us not forget Rory was also a young adult dating tennis player Caroline Wozniacki. There were a lot of tournaments where Rory literally dashed from the clubhouse to catch a flight to rendezvous with her.
His destination was either to a tennis event she was playing in, to her home in Monaco or to some romantic holiday destination. It seemed on the outside as if Rory was enjoying sheer bliss. But there was one big question: was his golf suffering as a result of all this?
Perhaps not towards the end of that season, but before that, and after, many big names in the world of golf were criticising him heavily for it. It was just the start of a period of upheaval, uncertainty and great changes going on in his life – on and off the golf course.
Ultimately McIlroy is programmed very well. He knows what he wants and will do anything required to achieve his goals. Even if it means making huge changes in his personal and personnel life – and cutting long lasting ties – he won’t shy away.