With Rory McIlroy, the Resilience Is the Point

In 2008, Rory McIlroy’s first full season on the European Tour, he was merely a tantalizing prospect but not yet the future of golf. In late summer, he missed three cuts in a row but then caught fire at the European Masters, going 63-71-66 at Crans-sur-Sierre Golf Club in Switzerland to take a four-stroke lead into the final round. At 19, he was looking to become the third-youngest winner in Euro Tour history. (Naturally, Seve Ballesteros held the record at the time.) After a topsy-turvy final round, McIlroy arrived at the 72nd hole needing a par to secure the victory. He flew the green with his approach shot, pitched on and then faced a 5-footer for glory. He yanked it. That set up sudden death against journeyman Jean-Francois Lucquin, who was winless in 175 career starts. Both players faced mid-range birdie putts on the first extra hole. McIlroy missed his and then committed the biggest blunder of his young career, blowing the 18-inch comebacker to gift-wrap the victory for the Frenchman. McIlroy tried to be philosophical in defeat, saying, “C'est la vie."

Two months later he shot a final-round 65 to join a three-way playoff at the Hong Kong Open but got pipped by Wen-tang Lin’s birdie on the second extra hole. McIlroy kept coming. In January 2009 he traveled to Dubai for the Desert Classic. It was McIlroy’s to lose from the moment he took the lead with a first-round 64. His playing partner, 52 year-old Mark O’Meara, was suitably impressed. “Ball-striking wise at 19, he's probably better than what Tiger was at 19,” said O’Meara, an early mentor to Woods. “His technique I think is better. Certainly Tiger has developed his game and swing over the years and made modifications to be able to hit the ball pin-high, but Rory is already doing that and he's 19, so he's already a step ahead." The European press spooned it up. With typical nuance, a headline in The Scotsman declared, “McIlroy is better than a young Tiger Woods."

McIlroy in Dubai, January 2009.

McIlroy pressed forward in Dubai, forging a two-stroke lead heading into the final round. This was the moment of truth for the can’t-miss-kid. The Sunday collapse in Switzerland, the playoff loss in Hong Kong…those could be chalked up to the acquisition of data if he pulled through in Dubai. But were McIlroy to blow another lead it would constitute a troubling trend. The whispers would begin and the press conference questions were sure to become more barbed. An insidious doubt could creep in. Golf history is littered with awesome physical talents whose careers were torpedoed by emotional fragility, mental deficiency, metaphysical turmoil.

McIlroy began the final round like a man playing for his reputation, birdying the first three holes. But he double-bogeyed the fourth hole and bogeyed the eighth, slicing his lead to a lone stroke. The TV announcers murmured their concern. McIlroy responded by birdying the 9th hole. And the 10th. Then the 11th. And the 12th. And the 13th! He was six shots clear, and the grill room at Holywood Golf Club in Northern Ireland was delirious. Go on, Rors! The son of the club bartender had finally done it. His parents Gerry and Rosie were in the gallery in Dubai, fighting back tears. All those graveyard shifts at the 3M factory, the grungy toilets at the rugby club that had to be cleaned, the putting sessions as the sun set, schlepping all over the world just to give their only child a chance…it was all worth it now. A blue-collar family from a small town in a troubled homeland had birthed a champion. What a story.

McIlroy’s coronation over the closing holes hit a little snag on the 15th hole when he caught a 7-iron heavy and made bogey, but no big deal. At 16 he drove it into the trees and made another bogey. The lead was now down to three strokes and the TV crew perked up, describing McIlroy as “excitable” and “jumpy.” On the 17th tee, McIlroy’s right hand flew off the club in the follow-through and his ball sailed wide right into a bad lie in a bunker. He made his third straight bogey as playing partner Justin Rose poured in a long birdie putt. The lead was down to one, and now the mood shifted to foreboding, perhaps dread.

At the watery par-5 18th hole, a strong headwind forced McIlroy to lay up, leaving only a wedge in. Flooded by adrenaline, nerves and perhaps a touch of fear, McIlroy nuked his third shot over the green, into the back bunker. A collective groan emanated from the crowd. As McIlroy settled into the sand, facing a green running away from him toward the water, it felt like his entire future was riding on this up-and-down. He executed the shot flawlessly, getting his ball to stop three feet from the hole. He had that par putt for victory, and salvation. Said Rose, “It took a lot of guts just to hole that putt.” The celebration married joy and relief, a portend of things to come. “It was probably the best shot I've hit under pressure,” the champ said. “It's definitely a burden off my shoulders or a monkey off my back. If I had not won today, having a six-shot lead, it would have been pretty tough to take, and it would have been hard to come back from that I think.”

Sound familiar?!

For all of his extravagant talent, McIlroy has never made it easy on himself…or us. By the time he was 23 he had won both the U.S. Open (2011) and PGA Championship (‘12) by 8 strokes; that simultaneously confirmed his genius and created an impossible standard by which he would forever be judged. After McIlroy’s double-dip at the 2014 British Open and PGA, a funny thing happened on the way to the Hall of Fame: he began showing the same fragility as during those long-ago closing holes in Dubai. St. Andrews, Los Angeles Country Club, Pinehurst…McIlroy’s fans—and they are legion—had come to dread the big moments, for fear of having their hearts stomped on yet again. But nothing could prepare the golf world for the stressfest of the final round of this year’s Masters. As Brandel Chamblee said in a recent interview, “It was a drama-tragedy playing out before our eyes and we didn’t know if the hero was going to get murdered in the final scene or save the whole world. Who wrote this— Stephen King? Shakespeare? Aaron Sorkin? I think it was one of the most riveting performances in the history of sport.”

For all of the transcendent shots that McIlroy hit on Sunday at Augusta National—on 7, on 15 (!) and stone-dead on the first playoff hole to finally complete his destiny—it is the metaphysical that lingers. McIlroy’s victory was a monument to his tenacity, grit, grind, mental toughness and so many other things that don’t show up on a launch monitor. For 11 years, McIlroy has been dogged by one question: will he ever win the Masters and complete the career Grand Slam? Now that he’s done it, different questions come into focus: how did this child prodigy, who can make the game look so easy, develop a virtually- unprecedented resilience? And how far will it carry him forward? “Where that resilience comes from—it’s an interesting question,” says golf’s leading sports psychologist, Bob Rotella, who has worked with McIlroy since 2010. “Some people may be born with it. A lot of people aren’t. Either way, if you want to be great you have to develop that resilience. It’s a skill just like any other.”

Ben Hogan, the steely-eyed Hawk who will forever be revered for his toughness, once said, “I feel sorry for rich kids now, I really do. Because I knew tough things, and I had a tough day all my life and I can handle tough things. They can't."

Hogan’s father shot himself through the heart while his young son played in the next room. McIlroy was blessed with loving, supportive parents but they had to scrape and claw to give their son the opportunity to compete against top competition. His parents’ work schedules were so at odds that Rory has called them ships passing in the night. “Why can’t we be like normal families?” he would ask. McIlroy competed with a palpable hunger early in his career, as if he had a debt to settle. At the 2011 Masters he took a four-stroke lead into the final round but imploded with an 80; after he called his mum back in Holywood and sobbed over the phone. The next day, McIlroy flew to the Malaysian Open and picked himself off the mat to finish third, one of the more remarkable performances of his career. “People can’t comprehend how hard it is to rebound like that,” says Brad Faxon, McIlroy’s putting coach. Indeed, the seasoned veteran Francesco Molinari had his own self-immolation at Augusta, in 2019, and has never been heard from again.

Two months after he gave away the 2011 Masters, McIlroy summoned a performance for the ages at the U.S. Open. But it gets harder to remain resilient as the scar tissue grows. McIlroy’s fallow decade in the major championships that preceded this Masters breakthrough can be attributed to a lot of things: ill-timed soccer games with friends, a lingering rib injury, inconsistencies in his approach (and coach) with his putting, deficiencies in his wedge game, the distraction of PGA TOUR politics, turbulence in his love life. He had 21 top-10s in the major championship from 2015-2024 and recently admitted the near misses had become so painful that a piece of him retreated. “It’s a self-preservation mechanism,” McIlroy said. “You’re trying to not put 100% of yourself out there because of that. Instinctually, as human beings, we hold back sometimes because of the fear of getting hurt, whether that’s a conscious decision or subconscious decision and I was doing that on the course a little bit for a few years.”

McIlroy recommitted to working with Rotella in 2022 and began to embrace the struggle. “I’ve hammered it over and over again: This is hard, it’s difficult,” says Rotella. “Rory is one of the most talented players ever to play the game. He can hit any shot. So what he’s had to do is look inside of himself. That’s been the message: It’s inside of you already, just bring it out. Faced with that kind of challenge, a player can go this way or that way. He accepted the challenge.”

The devastating defeats at the Old Course and LACC and Pinehurst actually lightened McIlroy’s burden. “Once you go through those heartbreaks or disappointments, you get to a place where you remember how it feels and you wake up the next day and you’re like, Yeah, life goes on, it’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be,” McIlroy says. “You dust yourself off and you go again. That’s why I’ve become a little more comfortable in laying everything out there and being somewhat vulnerable at times.”

The final round of the 2025 Masters was a crucible like no other. “I don’t think any player has ever faced that kind of pressure and stress,” says Chamblee. “I mean ever. You could argue Bobby Jones at Merion in 1930 [when he was trying to complete the Grand Slam] or Tiger at Augusta in 2001 [when he was trying to finish off the Tiger Slam], but those wins had a sense of inevitability. There was nothing inevitable about Rory on Sunday at Augusta. It was the opposite—he was holding on for dear life.”

In the wake of the Masters there has been much frenzied speculation about how much damage an unburdened McIlroy might do. But it won’t be that easy. With him, it never is. “It’s supposed to be hard,” says Rotella. “It’s a game of mistakes. Can you live with those? Can you overcome them? The tendency for most players is to overreact. But even the player who wins makes a lot of mistakes across four rounds. Rory has accepted that. He won’t ever give in. He’s not afraid of making mistakes because he has developed zero doubt that he can survive them.”

Says Faxon, “Jack [Nicklaus] always said one of the hardest things to do is keep playing well after you win. That’s not a classic definition of resilience but it’s a function of how much a player burns to win, how bad they want it. Are they willing to pay the price even when they’ve already achieved one dream after another?” Faxon chuckles and then offers an ominous thought for McIlroy’s competition: “He’s not slowing down. He’s hungry for more. Rory is a student of history and that’s why he was so overwhelmed with the Masters win—he knows how much it means. And he wants to keep going. He wants to make more history.

He knows it won’t be easy and, honestly, I think he kind of likes it that way."