Ever since his Open Championship victory in 2014, the opening three months of a calendar year were always viewed through a green-tinted lens for Rory McIlroy, with the Masters as the ultimate goal.
His triumph there last year only intensifies that focus, because for all that he’s achieved, it’s major championships, Ryder Cups and the Olympic Games that are going to really count from here on in.
Sure, winning a record-tying eighth and breaking-breaking ninth Harry Vardon Trophy as the leading player on the DP World Tour’s Race to Dubai will be nice additions to his résumé, especially this year where an old nemesis named Patrick Reed has laid down the gauntlet, but Order of Merit titles have increasingly become by-products of strong major championship performances – with the odd tournament win in Europe or the Middle East naturally helping – so, in a year with no Ryder Cup or no Olympics to serve as distraction, it’s all about four weeks for the Career Grand Slam champion.
So, with those Augusta-green-tinted spectacles donned, how is it shaping thus far?
Well, he’s oh-for-four in terms of victories this season, but, for the reasons already listed, we can’t read too much into regular tour victories. But there has been lots of positives.
A T3 at the Dubai Invitational where, by his own admission, he was shaking off the rust and not focusing too much on the ‘W’ was a promising start, but the T33 at the Hero Dubai Desert Classic a week later was less than inspiring, given that it’s a golf course that maximises his strengths and an event that he’s won on four occasions, including back-to-back successes in ’23 and ’24.
As defending champion at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, he finished tied for 14th, five shots behind Collin Morikawa, but he made three doubles and a triple – highly uncharacteristic, of course – and without those, he was right there. But that’s not the way golf works. Every shot and every hole counts, uncharacteristic or not.
Which takes us to Riviera last week and the Genesis Invitational. A T2 finish was his best of the year, and his best result in the decade that he’s made the event a regular feature on his schedule. If he’d been able to hole even close to his fair share of putts on the weekend, he might be celebrating his first victory in Tiger Woods’ event, but the Poa annua greens have never been his preferred surface, and of all the statistical metrics, Strokes Gained: Putting is generally the most variable week-to-week.
Instead, it’s his tee-to-green game and approach play in particular that has been most impressive, and those were the main weapons deployed as he finally got the better of Augusta National last year.
At Riviera, he ranked third in Strokes Gained: Approach, fourth at Pebble Beach, and ranked first in Tee-to-green in the former and third in the latter, and that’s what we want to see from one of the game’s premier ball-strikers.
We’re still more than six weeks out from the Masters, and how he performs at the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill, in another title defence at TPC Sawgrass for The Players Championship, and in one of the two Texas-based events in the two weeks prior to the Masters will be much stronger indicators of where his game is at, but the early signs are good.
He’s back on Bermuda greens for the Florida swing – a surface he much prefers – as it will be in Texas, before he tackles Augusta National’s Bentgrass surfaces, which are much closer to Bermuda than Poa annua.
But as much as form is important when entering major week, keeping calm under the weight of pressure and expectation are equally so.
Finally getting the Augusta National monkey off his back has certainly eased the latter, but it brings with it additional pressures. For the first time ever, he’ll gear up for Masters week in the Champions’ Locker Room, and he’ll make his first appearance at the Tuesday night Champions’ Dinner where he’ll have the honour of setting the menu and preparing a speech to deliver to almost every living legend the game has to offer.
If you think there’s no pressure in that, think again. In Masters history, only Jack Nicklaus, Nick Faldo, and Tiger Woods have ever successfully defended, and only Faldo managed it the year after winning his first.
But Rory now has the opportunity to join an even more exclusive group than the one he joined last April, and for a man who values golfing history like he does, that’s more than enough incentive to have him firing on all cylinders when he tees off that Thursday, and that’s before taking into consideration that a Scottie Scheffler win would see him tie McIlroy on five major titles, and a Brooks Koepka victory would see him move to six.
But right now, he’s trending in the right direction and that’s all we can ask for. And taking down Scheffler in a head-to-head at Bay Hill or Sawgrass wouldn’t do his chances any harm.
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