by Shane Ryan
18
HOYLAKE, MERSEYSIDE COUNTY, ENGLAND
Royal Liverpool and the British Open; Biased Wind, Slanted Rain; The Rory Wave
Q. You said in April that the game was just waiting for somebody, for one of the best players to stand up and take it by the scruff of the next. Do you feel this is a platform to do that sort of thing?
RORY MCILROY: I hope so. I definitely hope so.
—BMW PGA Championship, May 25, 2014
“All the stories have been told
Of Kings and days of old
But there’s no England now.”
—The Kinks
On to England—England after the age of empire, with its profound identity crisis and lingering gentility. The Open Championship—call it the “British Open” at your own peril—is the oldest major in the world, and, to European golfers, the most prestigious. It’s almost always played on links courses—“linksland” being the rolling, sandy stretches between the beach and the arable mainland. As David Owen wrote in The New Yorker, this is where, sometime around the start of the fifteenth century, Scottish shepherds invented golf on the terrain that would come to define the look of modern courses. Sheep and cattle grazed the fairways, coarse grasses grew wild in the rough, livestock huddled together in the bitter winds to form the sandy depressions that became bunkers, and hungry rabbits with low jawbones chewed the grass to the quick on the tees and greens.
Aside from that common history, there’s not much thematic consistency to the Open from year to year, especially when compared to the U.S. Open. The courses can be relatively easy like St. Andrew’s—where the last three winning scores have been -16, -14, and Tiger Woods’s record-setting -19 in 2000—or they can be brutally difficult, in the Royal Birkdale mode, where Padraig Harrington’s +3 carried the day in 2008. Even on the same course, conditions can vary wildly with the weather. When the driving wind and rain are working in concert, there is no such thing as an easy links course.
The 2014 Open landed at Royal Liverpool Golf Club. To reach the grounds, you have to leave the port city from which it takes its name, cross the River Mersey, and make your way to the west coast of the Wirral Peninsula and into the coastal village of Hoylake. It’s a quaint little hamlet, and wealthy, but compared to the gaudy mansion communities lining the PGA Tour’s American courses, you have to look close to notice. Next, take a walk down Meols Drive, beneath the privet hedges with their sweet, cloying odor, and past the brick-and-stone cottages with flower gardens and crawling vines. Here, the houses have names, and you can read them on the stone pillars marking each entrance, English to the core—Hatherleigh, Shearwater, the Coppice, Denewood, Chalgrove, Wentworth, Innesholme, Rothley, and my personal favorite, Nan’s Nook.
Then it’s on to the course itself, set alongside the River Dee—undulating, wind-beaten, and hard. The wild rough grows thick with tall grass, pinkish blooms of Yorkshire fog, dandelions, purple harebells, and the rough sorrel, which lends a reddish hue to the golden fescue. The wind mostly aids the golfers on the front nine, but there’s an about-face starting on no. 11, when the course heads straight into the gales along the River Dee—a body of water that’s more of an estuary, melding with the Irish Sea.
Look southwest, and you’ll see the rocky hills of Wales less than five miles away. Look due west, squint your eyes, and use your imagination, and you may convince yourself that far out across the sea, you’ve caught just the faintest glimpse of Dublin—just two and a half hours away by catamaran, according to a friendly marshal.
Much was made of potential windy conditions in the week leading up to the Open, and for a good reason—Royal Liverpool needed it. Despite the rough, and the swales, this is one of the easier stops on the British Open circuit. Management tried to toughen it up a bit in 2014, still harboring a memory of 2006, when Tiger nearly equaled his own record with a score of -18. They built an extra hillock or two, but it was purely cosmetic—the greens stayed huge, and they stayed flat. As long as players managed to avoid the pot bunkers with their steep walls of sod, it was no difficult task to hit green after green in regulation, even from the rough.
All it would take from there was a few hot putters, and scores would soar. Against this fate, Mother Nature was Royal Liverpool’s only protection.
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Following his win at the Congressional, Justin Rose took the Scottish Open at Royal Aberdeen, and came in to Hoylake as the favorite. Adam Scott, too, had long targeted this British Open as the venue for his second major title.
Unfortunately for both of them, the bad weather did indeed hit Hoylake, and it did indeed protect the course from low scores—but only for half the field. The players who went off in the morning on Thursday had clear skies and minimal wind, and they tore up Royal Liverpool exactly as everyone expected they would. In the afternoon, though, the conditions got very ugly. The leaderboard after the first round paints the picture—of the top eighteen players, sixteen of them had teed off before noon. The only two exceptions were Shane Lowry and Adam Scott, who manfully fought their way to four-under on the day. Everyone else in the afternoon wave—all sixty-six who started their rounds after noon—failed to make an impact.
One of golf’s best and truest proverbs is that you need to get lucky to win a major, but rarely do you see fate intrude this emphatically. Nevertheless, the system is designed to regulate these discrepancies, and the Open is no exception. The players who teed off in the morning on Thursday would go in the afternoon on Friday, and vice versa.
This particular safeguard, for all its good intentions, can’t do anything about the vagaries of the weather. The unlucky golfers from Thursday afternoon looked on with dismay when they discovered the same conditions on Friday morning. Again, they fought wind and bouts of rain, and again, like a nightmare, the conditions became serene the minute they had finished, just in time for the afternoon wave.
By the end of play on Friday, the situation was even more exaggerated—seventeen of the top-twenty golfers had played Thursday morning and Friday afternoon, including ten of the top eleven. Adam Scott (-3) and Justin Rose (-2) were two of the three exceptions, and had arguably played some of the best golf in the field just to stay under par.
Their heroic efforts weren’t good enough—nine shots ahead of Scott, and ten ahead of Rose, Rory McIlroy had taken advantage of his lucky draw. His success came with a bit of irony, since he had complained about the British Open in 2011, annoyed by how “the outcome is predicted so much by the weather.” What goes around comes around, and he ripped Royal Liverpool to shreds, posting 66 on back-to-back days. He towered over the leaderboard at -12, and he had done it by burying the so-called “Friday curse.” There was a feeling after Thursday’s round that he might stumble the next day, as he’d done for most of the spring and summer. When he went low instead, it was like watching a wild animal break down the walls of his cage—the last barrier between the killer and his prey had collapsed, and now there would be carnage.
And the golf was exquisite. For those days in Hoylake, Rory represented the perfect confluence of finesse and power. Every swing had the imprint of genius, and the imperfections only made the entire performance more stunning. There were errant shots. There were drives that vanished into the fescue, with Rory vanishing right behind them, only to emerge moments later on the heels of a gorgeous recovery, marching up the fairway to the expansive green—an expanse he didn’t need, incidentally, because his homesick ball, buried in coarse grass or resting on baked earth, would make a beeline for the pin, obstacles or bad lies or physics be damned.
Bit by bit, birdie by birdie, his score fell, and he seemed to move in his own sovereign, electric field. He glided along the fairways, up and down the laborious swales, while everyone else plodded step by heavy step. The old sensations coursed through the air, sharp currents that grew more acute with each brilliant par save, each mad scramble. The glory days of Congressional, and Kiawah Island, had come rushing back in our memories, and we knew the trut
h again—this virtuosity comes once in a generation, at best, and though we force the empty comparison on each new prodigy, you cannot fake the flush of recognition—the heightened awareness; the rush of greatness; the unmistakable impression that brings the name “Tiger” to the tip of every tongue.
* * *
“Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”
—JAMES JOYCE, in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The life of Rory begins in Holywood, County Down, Northern Ireland, a small coastal town on the Belfast Lough, just a five-mile drive from the capital city itself. Gerry McIlroy, a onetime scratch golfer, married Rosaleen McDonald in 1998. Their only child, Rory, came along a year later, and was swinging plastic clubs before his third birthday. They weren’t rich—Gerry was a bartender at the Holywood Golf Club—and they had to take on extra jobs to pay for their Rory’s travels on the junior golf circuit. Gerry became a cleaner, and Rosaleen worked nights in a 3M factory, all to support their son’s dream.
There is nobody born in that complicated nation who escapes the stain of sectarian violence that has battered the six counties since the partition of Ireland in 1920. While the rest of the island became the Irish Free State, and an autonomous republic in 1949, Northern Ireland remained under British control. Before long, it was a battleground in the fight between the Catholics who wanted to join the rest of Ireland and the Protestants who remained loyal to the crown. The history of the young country is one of murder and terror, of hunger strikes and bombs and broken truces. Even a young man like McIlroy, born just nine years before the Good Friday Agreement that brought a measure of peace to the nation, can’t escape the ugly history.
Like many of his countrymen, Rory doesn’t have to travel far back in time to find tragedy. Joe McIlroy, the brother of Rory’s grandfather Jimmy, made the mistake of moving his family to a Protestant neighborhood of east Belfast in the late sixties, at the height of “The Troubles.” The McIlroys are Catholic, and Joe was a computer technician who thought he and his wife and four daughters could live peacefully in the middle-class community. He was proven wrong almost immediately, enduring constant abuse as he stubbornly tried to forge an ordinary life.
In 1972, with his daughters sleeping upstairs, Joe came down to fix a washing machine in his kitchen. He didn’t know that a group of gunmen from the Ulster Volunteer Force—Protestant paramilitaries—had camped out in his garden, and were waiting for him. They opened fire through the back door, and hit their target seven times. Wounded, Joe managed to fight his way into the living room, where he collapsed in the arms of his wife, Mary. She ran screaming into the street, his daughters rushed downstairs, and Joe McIlroy, thirty-two, died in his home—an example for any other Catholic who thought he could move into a Protestant neighborhood.
This was the most dramatic instance of sectarian violence affecting the McIlroys, but they were never far from the religious crucible that defined life in Northern Ireland. Rory’s grandfather Jimmy repaired cranes on the Belfast docks, but was banned from the shipyards themselves, which were reserved exclusively for Protestants. He took up golf, playing at the Holywood Golf Club, where he and his sons were in the club’s minority Catholic population. Even in Holywood, where the family settled, they were outnumbered by more than two-to-one.
Despite the specter of Joe’s death as a haunting backdrop, the McIlroys never became extremists. Today, Rory maintains an iron silence on the political situation in Northern Ireland, and that mind-set seems to have begun with his father and grandfather, who strived to coexist in a fraught environment. Writing for The New York Times, Niall Stanage posited that this nonviolent approach is particularly prevalent in McIlroy’s generation. You can see Rory as the most visible figure in a broad movement among young Northern Irish to let their religious affiliations fade into the background, so that they can be defined by something—anything—else.
At the Sullivan Upper School, Rory wore a blazer with the Gaelic motto “Lamh Foisdineach An Uachtar”—With the gentle hand foremost—an aspirational philosophy for a generation who were raised in the shadow of violence. This was no small gesture in Northern Ireland; personal identity has been a function of religion and politics for so long that divorcing from it seems almost revolutionary.
Then, too, Joe McIlroy’s death might have played an instructive role for the family, one whose lesson resounded with greater clarity when Rory became a superstar: Maybe it wasn’t the safest idea for a Catholic with a sizable platform to espouse controversial views—at least not as long as he wanted to live safely in Northern Ireland.
Rory takes this neutrality to an extreme. Before he won his first majors, it was difficult to discern whether he was Catholic or Protestant. The same could be said for Graeme McDowell, who was raised in a Protestant family—neither spoke about their backgrounds unless they were forced, and even then they used broad language, careful never to be pinned down to a single controversial view.
You can count on two hands the number of times Rory’s religious background has infringed on his public life—a remarkable feat of discretion for one of the world’s greatest golfers, especially considering his outgoing nature. The first big intrusion came after his triumph at Congressional Country Club, when the twenty-two-year-old won the 2011 U.S. Open by eight strokes for his first major title. What happened in the immediate aftermath—a brief, unremarkable moment for anyone who didn’t understand the tensions of his home nation—reverberated back home.
As the Daily Mail described it, a fan threw an Irish flag at Rory as he walked away from the 18th hole. He caught it instinctually, the feed cut away, and when it returned a moment later, the flag was gone.
The mystery of the vanishing tricolor sparked an online furor, with loyalist Protestant populations praising McIlroy and nationalist Catholics accusing him of everything up to and including treason. Internet message boards burned with rhetoric and armchair analysis, Facebook pages sprouted up, and in some quarters, the whole episode overshadowed the stellar week of golf that had earned him his first major championship. Nobody actually knew what happened to the flag, but what became exceedingly clear in the aftermath was that Rory had been right to stay quiet—it proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that when it came to Northern Irish politics, he was damned both ways.
The two times McIlroy was asked whether he felt more Irish or British—first by the PGA Tour, second by Fox Sports—he answered with the same word: “Pass.” Later, he gave insight into the thought process that had governed much of his career, saying, “I have to be very careful in what I say and do.”
He would have liked nothing better than to avoid the topic entirely, but as it happened, the International Golf Federation successfully lobbied the IOC to have golf included in the 2016 and 2020 Olympics. For McIlroy, who had played for Ireland in World Cups, it brought up a dicey question: Who would he represent if he played in the 2016 Games?
“I’d probably play for Great Britain,” he told The Telegraph in 2009. “I have a British passport. It’s a bit of an awkward question still.”
A rash comment by his standards, and it provoked the expected reaction. Ireland is known for turning against its brightest and best, and if they needed an excuse to vilify Rory, they had it. Stanage, in The New York Times, quoted another famous line from Joyce—“When the soul of a man is born in this country, there are nets flung at it to hold it back.” As if to prove her point, rumors about Rory’s Olympic decision, and all the reactionary condemnations that came along with it, forced him to write an open letter on his Twitter account in 2012.
“Having just won three out of my last four tournaments,” he began, “including a second Major Championship, I was hoping that my success on the golf course would be the more popular golfing conversation today!”
By early 2013, he was considering not playing at all in order to avoid the controversy. That summer, Karen Crouse wrote a feature in The New York Times that seemed to encapsulate how Ireland took out its self-loathing on any
one with the audacity to strive for greatness. Like so many famous Irish artists of the past, McIlroy had by then left the country, settling in Florida. He had also left his Irish management company, Horizon Sports Management, to start one of his own, which sparked a feud with Graeme McDowell, a Horizon shareholder. His game was suffering, too, and had been since he switched from Titleist to Nike the previous November.
In Crouse’s piece, a customs official called McIlroy a “snob,” another deemed him a “spoiled brat,” and fans at the Irish Open disapproved of his private parking space with—God forbid!—a special placard. To top it off, the general secretary of Ireland’s Golfing Union was quoted saying that the public didn’t support Rory like they once had because of the Olympics situation.*1
For years, McIlroy tried to keep his cultural identity separate from his public image. That would be a very simple thing for most golfers, but for a kid from Northern Ireland, the effort alone was remarkable. And, of course, it couldn’t last. It wasn’t long before he was entangled in the same struggle that had defined his country for decades. He’s handled it with as much grace and reserve as possible, but understanding this aspect of his background is key to understanding Rory as a person. Outside of his golf, there is always this lingering shadow—the one that he’s spent a lifetime trying to escape, and the one he never will.
—
Rory learned golf from his father as a toddler, and loved it so much that he began watching instructional videos on his own. His talent was obvious, and the Holywood Club—a no-frills affair that stood in contrast to the haughty Royal Belfast Club nearby—changed its membership rules to allow Rory to join at age seven.
He began working with Michael Bannon, and the two have stayed together ever since—today, Bannon travels with McIlroy full-time. As Golf Digest reported in August, Rory stands out for the fact that his swing has remained more or less the same since his early childhood days. Unlike Tiger, who has undergone significant transformations at various stages of his career, Rory doesn’t foresee the essential components ever changing.