After declining media requests two days in a row, Rory McIlroy finally spoke to the press after his third round at the U.S. Open at Oakmont. But he was far from the jovial, engaging and eloquent Rory that we’ve become accustomed to.
The first question, directed from BBC’s Stephen Watson, elicited a two-word response followed by an extended silence as the expansion that was expected never arrived.
“Can you give us an assessment of your U.S. Open so far?” Watson asked. “Pretty average,” McIlroy responded, and offered nothing more.
After a few other questions regarding his game, his post-Masters hangover, and the challenges that Oakmont has presented this week, he was asked if his frustrations on the golf course were the reason that he’d opted to avoid the media after his six previous major championship rounds prior to Saturday.
“No, not really. It’s more a frustration with you guys,” he replied.
When asked for clarification, he was hesitant, before adding: “I’ve been totally available for the last few years, and I’m not saying — maybe not you guys, but maybe more just the whole thing.”
He went on to add that him refusing to talk to the press was nothing new, even if the frequency with which he’s done so has increased, and that he was happy with not being obligated to, before the final question which asked what he was looking for in Sunday’s final round.
“Hopefully a round in under four-and-a-half hours and get out of here.”
Paul McGinley knows McIlroy better than most, with a relationship extending back long before McIlroy threw his support behind McGinley’s captaincy bid for the 2014 Ryder Cup. And the Dubliner feels that McIlroy is not covering himself in glory with the way he’s handling the recent spate of negative attention.
“I didn’t enjoy them,” he said on NBC’s Golf Channel. “I don’t like to see that. I think Rory’s better than that. Either not talking to the media or giving a press conference like that doesn’t serve him well or rightly for the kind of person that he is.
“He looks fed up to me. He looks like he’s had enough of everything. Whether it was the emotional release of everything that’s gone on, not just winning the Masters, but everything in his career being pointed towards becoming a Grand Slam winner, and now he’s reeling on the ropes emotionally after that, I don’t know. But he’s not himself.
“This is not normal. When he does that, because people look up to him, players look up to him, he’s created such a great profile in the media, people like him, and a conference like that with his body language and short answers, it doesn’t serve him right.
“I don’t like to see it. I’m disappointed for Rory that it’s come to that. Something is eating at him. He hasn’t let us know what it is, but there’s something not right.”
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