Rory McIlroy to put heartbreak aside and ‘go again’ in his Major quest

Not even Woods was immune to making mistakes that led to the glittering prize being cruelly snatched from his grasp at the 11th hour.

In Woods’ case, the telling moment came in the 2009 PGA Championship at Hazeltine, where he failed to convert a 54-hole Major championship lead into a victory for the first time in his career.

Tellingly, it took Woods almost 10 years to grab that 15th Major win in the 2019 Masters after what was a crushing loss to YE Yang in Minnesota.

“We’ve all been there as champions,” Woods said in a post-US Open text message that McIlroy never received after the Holywood star changed his mobile number and only heard about the contents from the man himself this week.

​“We all lose. Unfortunately, it just happened. And the raw emotion of it, it’s still there. And it’s going to be there for, I’m sure, some time. The faster he’s able to get back on a horse and get back into contention, like he did last week, the better it is for him.”

If he fails to win The Open this week, McIlroy will have gone 10 years without a Major win and getting back on the horse will be easier said than done. After all, he “vividly” remembers “starting to feel a little uncomfortable” as he waited to convert that 30-inch par putt on the 16th green at Pinehurst.

Having missed it badly, then missed an even trickier putt at the 18th to lose to Bryson DeChambeau by a shot, it remains to be seen if he’ll be willing to put his neck on the line again.

Woods knows exactly how McIlroy felt in the heat of battle and his advice, while not quite comforting, is clear.

“There’s a lot of times I felt discomfort,” Woods said. “Yes, absolutely. Nervous, shaky, uncomfortable. That’s part of it. That’s why you love it. That’s why we practise, to build up ourselves in that one uncomfortable situation and bury it.”

Burying the demons of ghosts past is McIlroy’s task now, but having gone almost five years without challenging seriously for a Major following his fourth triumph in 2014, he believes he’s closer than ever now.

“It doesn’t bother me,” McIlroy said when asked how it feels to be asked incessantly about his Major drought. “I know that I’m in a good spot. If I think about 2015 through 2020, that five-year stretch, I seldom had a realistic chance to win a Major championship in that five-year period. So I’d much rather have these close calls. It means I’m getting closer.

“But yeah, absolutely, I’d love to be able to play the golf and get one over the line, but as soon as I do that, people are going to say, ‘Well, when are you going to win your sixth?’ So it’s never-ending.”

​Even Woods admitted that losing to the unheralded Yang was such a body blow. “Probably the hardest loss to get over was the YE Yang loss because I had the lead,” he said. “I had never lost a Major championship while leading.

“That took a little bit of time to get over that because I had made some pretty stupid mistakes in the middle part of the round. You can’t afford to make the mistakes that I made and expect to win tournaments. I know better than that.”

McIlroy is striking the ball so well from tee to green that his fate may hinge on his success with the putter on slow greens, and he’s opted for expert advice from Brad Faxon and Luke Donald rather than following Woods’ lead by adding lead tape to his putter.

“I don’t like to tinker too much with the putter,” said McIlroy, who also struggled with the pace of the greens at the Scottish Open on Sunday.

“I sort of picked Luke’s brain a little bit, and he always said he liked to focus on the tempo of his stroke and really, if anything, make it a little shorter and a little brisker on greens like this.”

Tempo and timing are everything in golf, and as Woods said, getting back on the horse is McIlroy’s big task this week.

“It’s funny how your mindset can go from I don’t want to see a golf course for a month to like four days later being, I can’t wait to get another shot at it,” he said of his post-US Open blues. “When that disappointment turns to motivation, that’s when it’s time to go again.”