Renowned coach Pete Cowen has addressed what he considers to be the biggest hurdle for Rory McIlroy as the four-time major winner signed off on a decade of major heartbreak with a disappointing missed cut at Royal Troon.
Cowen worked with McIlroy for an eight-month stint back in 2021, and has known the Holywood man since he was an up-and-coming teenager, and he thinks that it was pressure as well as the nasty side of the draw that lead to McIlroy’s abject performance in the final major of 2024.
“There’s a lot of pressure on Rory,” Cowen told bunkered.co.uk, after the Open Championship. “He did get the worst part of the draw but you did think he’d have been able to manage his game around there. If you hit some wild shots around there, you’re going to get penalised badly.
“The longer the time span is between majors, the harder it gets. It’s like winning again, you’ve got to start again almost, reset. That’s the problem with him. They put so much pressure on him winning the Masters and the Grand Slam.
“That’s almost all he’s thinking about between now and next April which is sad really because the other tournaments deserve the great players to keep playing.”
McIlroy came closer to ending that major drought this year than he had in any of the previous nine when he held a two-stroke lead with five holes left to play in the U.S. Open at Pinehurst, but three bogeys in his final four holes, including two missed short putts on 16 and 18 saw him come up one shot shy of Bryson DeChambeau.
“The one on 16 was almost just a mental aberration really,” Cowen said. “Normally he doesn’t miss those things and no one could believe it. The 18th was a very very difficult putt. People don’t realise how difficult that was. Anybody could have done that unfortunately. But difficult to watch when you see something like that.
“To be fair he played the best golf on that Sunday, but the best golf doesn’t always win.”
It will now be a long nine months before he gets his next shot at major redemption at Augusta National, though the Olympic Games in Paris provide an opportunity to banish some of the ghosts at least. Though the strongest field to assemble since golf-s reintroduction to the Olympic Games in 2016 stand between him and a Gold Medal, and included in this are world numbers one and two, Scottie Scheffler and Xander Schauffele, winners of three of the four majors in 2024.
McIlroy will be accompanied by teammate Shane Lowry and caddie Harry Diamond, the latter coming in for criticism in the aftermath of Pinehurst, but like Lowry who recently came out in support of Diamond in social media, Cowen completely dismisses any allegation that Diamond played any sort of significant role in McIlroy’s collapse.
“Harry is a great lad and a good caddie,” Cowen says adamantly. “He’s not hitting the shots. The responsibility comes down to the player all the time. It has to be, and the player has to take responsibility. That’s what it is really.”
Instead, it’s external factors turned internal factors that are the issue, Cowen feels, and argues that McIlroy has difficulty blocking out everything that is going on around him when he takes to the course in major championship mode.
“Everybody watches him hitting balls on the range and I said ‘well, that’s alright, all your focus is there on the range,'” he explains.
“You’ve got no time between shots and then when you get on the course the blinkers start opening up. You’ve got five or ten minutes between each shot and that’s when the brain starts thinking of other things. It’s not easy to switch back on and hit the shot.”
As somebody who knows the technical side of the game as well as anybody, Cowen knows that McIlroy’s technical flaws tend to surface when the microscopic heat is at its most intense, and nowhere is the pressure cooker turned up quite like at a major championship.
So the physical flaws manifest because of mental exertions.
“These guys are so good so most of it is down to the mental side of the game,” he said. “Expectations come into it. Course setup comes into it for certain players because when the course is set up for certain players, it doesn’t suit other players.
“Everybody says Augusta suits him because he hits a draw but Nicklaus won six times there and he’s a fader.”
Nobody could’ve predicted that when McIlroy claimed major title number four at Valhalla back in 2014 – his second in a row and fourth in four years – that he’d still be on four in 10 years’ time, and it’s now become a case of ‘will he ever?’ as opposed to ‘when will he win his next major?’
They say that winning your first major is the hardest and any others after that come easier, but the scar tissue that’s built up now mean that clearing the fifth hurdle seems like a monumentally tougher challenge for Rory than scaling the first.
But Cowen believes he can do it and is backing him to do so, even though he concedes that nothing can ever be taken for granted.
“If I had to put money on it, I’d say yes, but golf’s a funny game,” Cowen says. “You get a good break and all of a sudden you could win two or three in a row like Xander, but it gets harder. He wins big tournaments in any case.
“It’s a smaller stage. As the stage gets higher, the more difficult and the more stage fright you get. You’ve got to look at it and say when the stage gets that high, like on a major because that’s the highest stage he can hit, sometimes you get a bit of stage fright. Everybody does.
“Some players can put the blinkers on all the way round for five hours but a lot of people can’t put the blinkers on. You’ve got to win again, you’ve got to restart.”
The restart comes in April when he’ll roll down Magnolia Lane in search of that elusive Green Jacket and a place in the history books as one of only six players to hoist each major championship trophy.
And it’s hard to have the blinkers on in that scenario.
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