The world watches as Rory McIlroy aims to break nine-year major drought at The Open Championship

HOYLAKE, England – The 10th tee at The Renaissance Club in Gullane, Scotland, is set back against the trees, inaccessible to fans, so when a player up ahead needed a ruling that would take upwards of a half hour, Rory McIlroy and his playing partners had time to talk.

This was at last week’s Genesis Scottish Open, the co-sanctioned PGA TOUR and DP World Tour event. Tyrrell Hatton tapped a cube-shaped tee marker with his driver head. The tee markers you don’t want to mess with, he said, are the FedEx trucks – they feel like they’re filled with cement. The players laughed. Tom Kim wanted to know if McIlroy had ever partnered with Shane Lowry in any team events. McIlroy nodded and mentioned the 2007 European Amateur Team Championship. The conversation moved on to funny sponsorships, oddly logoed golf shirts.

Every so often, McIlroy walked to the back edge of the tee to look into the trees and be alone with his thoughts, as if to remind himself this wasn’t social hour. At 34, he’s still in the prime of his career, but that won’t last forever. He has work to do. The next day, with Robert MacIntyre having shot 64 in whipping winds and awaiting a possible playoff, McIlroy hit what he would call two of the best shots of his career, a 5-iron on 17 and a 2-iron into a stiff breeze at the last to set up a birdie-birdie finish and win by one. Superstars do what superstars do.

An examined life

McIlroy will again be the people’s choice at the 151st Open Championship at Royal Liverpool (Hoylake) as he tries to break what everyone knows by now is his nine-year drought in the majors. He is but one man on a quest to burnish what is already a Hall of Fame career, but this has become edge-of-your-seat, white-knuckle viewing. His fans can’t turn away.

The public’s appetite for all things McIlroy is insatiable and has been thus since the 2011 U.S. Open at Congressional, where ’04 Open champion Todd Hamilton’s young son asked, “When can we go see Rory McIlroy?”

McIlroy puts his shoes on one at a time; he wears seven metal spikes in each Nike. He has “RORS” stamped on the backs of his irons. Sometimes, mid-round, he’ll pull out a ziplocked baggie full of nuts, mostly cashews, and stuff a handful into his mouth. He gave some to Kim mid-round Sunday because that’s just who he is, holding fast to his peripheral vision amid the whirl of accomplishment and fame.

Photographic evidence: As he walked to the 18th green Sunday, spectators flooding into the fairway as officials closed the gallery rope behind him, McIlroy soaked up the applause even as he glanced back over his shoulder to make sure everyone else in the group had gotten through.

Are we looking too closely? Reading too much into it? Perhaps. To be sure, such an examined life is not normal. It can sometimes seem as if the entire sports universe knows the narrative of his career, namely that he won four majors by age 25 and hasn’t won since. At the 150th Open Championship at St. Andrews last summer, his putter went ice-cold as he made 16 pars and shot 70 to finish second.

He has six top-10 finishes in his last seven major starts, including two seconds and a third, and just lately those who have cast their lot with McIlroy have begun to dabble in something like cynicism, or whatever it is fans do in order to try to avoid further heartache. They say things like: It won’t last. This will end badly. I’ve seen this movie before. Think long-suffering Boston Red Sox or Chicago Cubs fans before their World Series absolutions.

McIlroy understands people get invested in what happens to him; he tries to help out, and by doing more than just winning. In 2019, after he lost the World Golf Championships-Mexico Championship to Dustin Johnson, two little boys were in tears. McIlroy invited them up to the locker room and told them he would be OK, even giving away his autographed shoes.

But nine years – there aren’t enough autographed shoes to go around.

“No one wants me to win another major more than I do,” he said before that final round of the U.S. Open at Los Angeles Country Club last month. His final round – poor putting, 16 pars, 70, another runner-up finish – was The Open Championship at St. Andrews all over again. His 34 putts were the second-most in the field as he lost more than two strokes to the field on the greens.

Afterward, McIlroy said, “I would go through 100 Sundays like this to get my hands on another major championship.” To which his fans collectively replied: Let’s hope it doesn’t take that long.

Stubborn optimism

McIlroy says he’s getting closer, which implies that someday he will indeed arrive. He’s still so young that he could win a major again not just once but many times over.

It almost seems cruel, like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown, to point out that this would seem to be the week, and the course, for him to get back to it. Hoylake is not only where he won the 2014 Open, the third of his four major titles (his fourth came three weeks later at the PGA Championship), but he was also dominant, carrying a six-shot lead into the final round. It suits his eye.

He’s also on a run of six straight top-10 finishes on the PGA TOUR, most recently his win in Scotland. Can he play in the wind? Yes. Can he make the putts when it matters? Yes, although everyone needs a bit of luck. He had given up on a short putt at the 12th hole, but a wind gust blew it in the hole; McIlroy shook his head and took over from there. The Renaissance Club roared as he birdied 14, 17 and 18, even if it meant heartache for Scotland’s MacIntyre.

“No one else but Rory could’ve done that,” said Dougie MacIntyre, Robert’s father. He’d been hoping to see his son win for the first time since the 2015 Scottish Amateur, but now he and his wife, daughters and granddaughters would be headed home thinking of what might have been.

Almost lost amid the fireworks was that McIlroy became the first to win the Scottish and Irish Opens in addition to The Open Championship. He also has twice won the RBC Canadian Open, and the U.S. Open. The majors, though, have lately seemed closed to him. The Masters Tournament, where he uncharacteristically missed the cut in April, carries the most weight since it would give him the career Grand Slam. Although he has twice won the PGA Championship, The Open has always seemed the most natural fit for Northern Ireland’s McIlroy.

“Yeah, it would be great for Rory to get the monkey off his back,” said Rickie Fowler, who finished second to McIlroy at the 2014 Open at Royal Liverpool. “I think in a way it would be kind of similar to me getting the first one and getting that off my back.”

That McIlroy has had one hand on all those trophies lately has made the wait even tougher.

“I'm as close as I've ever been, really,” he said last week. “My consistency in the performances, especially in the majors over the last couple years is way better than it has been over the last few years. So, I'm really pleased at that but at the same time, having had a really good chance at St Andrews; having a really good chance in L.A. a few weeks ago...”

In both cases he faltered only in that most elemental golfing skill: willing the ball into the hole.

“Hopefully,” he said after making those big putts under pressure at The Renaissance Club on Sunday, “this breaks the seal, and we can go on from here.”

After jarring the last putt from just inside 11 feet, McIlroy looked to the sky and laughed. He hugged his caddie, Harry Diamond, and on the way to the scoring trailer stopped to kiss his wife, Erica. He tried to scoop up their daughter, Poppy, but she wasn’t having it. She’d just woken up from a nap, and the only golfer she wanted to see was Tommy Fleetwood. McIlroy laughed.

What could he do? What can any of us do? Just put one foot in front of the other and keep firing away. It’s a fickle game, but the universe loves action, and McIlroy is taking it.