Rory McIlroy returns from disappointment to start FedExCup Playoffs

GERMANTOWN, Tenn. – Flawless execution and peak euphoria.

Regrettable lapses and crippling disappointment.

The PGA TOUR is like any brightly lit stage for baton-twirling overachievers in that all who perform there are bound to experience all of the above. So it was that Rory McIlroy sat and answered questions Wednesday about his third-place finish at The Open Championship four weeks ago, when he took 36 putts, shot 70, and was upstaged by Cameron Smith (64).

McIlroy had been out of sight since, which begged the question: What were the days after St. Andrews like?

“Tough,” he said from the FedEx St. Jude Championship, the first stop in the three-week FedExCup Playoffs. “That night was tough. The few days after it were OK, I guess. It probably took me three or four days to … sort of get back to myself again.”

In case you were in Machu Pichu and/or your television exploded, everything was aligned just so for McIlroy at the 150th Open. He was the crowd favorite. He and wife Erica and daughter Poppy stayed at the Rusacks hotel overlooking the 18th hole at the Old Course. Poppy waved to him and Tiger Woods during the Celebration of Champions early in the week. McIlroy took the 54-hole lead and started the final round well in control of his nerves, and his game.

“I stood on the 10th tee with a two-shot lead and birdied the 10th,” he said at TPC Southwind on Wednesday.

He’s not still processing just where it all went wrong. He’s already done that. He was just answering a writer’s question.

It was an utterly unspectacular loss. There was no Jean van de Velde moment, or even a Mito Pereira moment, just a succession of birdie putts sliding by the hole as Smith, playing ahead of him, filled up the cup. Meeting the press afterward, McIlroy said he’d done nothing egregiously wrong but nothing all that right, either. He kept his composure but left in a golf cart with his head buried in his wife’s shoulder. You sensed this one was going to leave a mark.

What McIlroy needed in the wake of such disappointment, he knew immediately, was to get away. So instead of returning home to Jupiter, Florida, he and Erica and Poppy hung out in London for two weeks.

“Completely just got away from golf,” said McIlroy, who comes into the Playoffs at sixth in the FedExCup. “I took two weeks off, didn't touch a club, didn't see the inside of a gym, probably didn't eat a vegetable.”

One thing cushioned the blow: “It's not as if I went out there, shot 75,” he said. “I went and played a solid round of golf, didn't get as much out of it as I was hoping for, but I think because of how I played, it made it I guess just a little easier to get over.”

While he was getting over it, Tony Finau, who had racked up his own share of gut-wrenching losses, won the 3M Open and Rocket Mortgage Classic, highlighting the importance of perseverance. It’s what the best players do, and McIlroy, a 21-time PGA TOUR winner who is back up to third in the Official World Golf Ranking, knows all about it.

He began the current season with a win at THE CJ CUP @ SUMMIT in Las Vegas and shot a final-round 62 to win the RBC Canadian Open in June. The hard part is he’s had one hand on a lot of trophies that got away. That’s also the best part. He finished in the top 10 in all four majors. He has 11 top-25s in 13 total starts. He is almost never out of it.

“I'm back to playing the golf that I'm used to playing and the golf that I know that I can play,” he said. “… This year feels very similar to the way I played in 2019. It's a carbon copy in terms of the consistency and the numbers and strokes gained numbers, but my finishes in the majors have been better and that's been a real positive looking ahead into next year and the future.”

Those similarities would seem to bode well for the next three weeks, given that McIlroy won his second FedExCup in 2019. No one has won it three times, so McIlroy is playing to make history.

Scottie Scheffler, the only four-time winner this season, has a fat cushion over everyone else, including McIlroy. Still, with quadruple points available this week and next, he could bridge the 1,452-point gap between them. Winning the FedExCup, McIlroy reminded, is about fashioning a solid body of work throughout the season, then getting hot in the Playoffs.

“You have to really turn it on for the last few weeks,” he said.

Three FedExCup titles; not even Tiger Woods has that on his resume. Although McIlroy has never won at TPC Southwind, he shot three 66s on the way to a T12 last year. He also knows what it takes to master the TOUR’s endgame. He’ll have to make some putts, let the bad shots slide by, and keep plowing ahead and playing his kind of golf – with or without his vegetables.