Rory McIlroy is not mentally weak but ‘scar tissue’ is a major problem – Paul McGinley

“There’s a lot of that,” McGinley says. “Look, I don’t want to give the impression that Rory is mentally weak, he’s far from it. You look at his career in the last 10 years and what he’s won since he last won a Major championship and it’s phenomenal, it’s unmatched. Nobody comes close.

“He is by far, in my opinion, the best player in the modern era and by no means is he mentally weak. But there is an element of doubt that’s crept in, that’s been validated by 10 years of not succeeding in Major championships. He knows that. We all know it. We saw it with Xander Schauffele. We saw the weight of expectation on his shoulders, we saw the pressure.”

With far less talent, McGinley found a way to soar to 18th in the world but won just four times as an individual and felt such pressure after three big chances slipped away in 2005 that he admitted his failures preyed on his mind until he got over the line and won the Volvo Masters at Valderrama.

Schauffele said the overwhelming emotion he felt after lipping in that six-footer to win the PGA at Valhalla last month was “relief”, and McGinley understood exactly what he meant.

“The element of doubt has risen every year and it’s been validated by not getting over the line, and it’s only a natural human emotion,” McGinley said. “And that’s what Xander was saying. He said, ‘Nobody was harder on me than myself’. He said, ‘I had a lot of dark moments’.”

McIlroy knows he has tightened up every time he’s had a chance to win a Major in recent years, “and when you have a brain and when you think and you have emotions, that’s when it’s toughest”, McGinley believes.

“If you have a John Daly approach, let’s just say, where you couldn’t care less, well it’s a lot easier to get over the line from that state of mind than it is if you’re somebody who deeply understands the importance of winning Major championships like Rory does. So he’s in a difficult place but it’s not a place that he can’t get out of.

“There’s no doubt he got tight last year. He admitted it himself, he got tight. I’ve been there, I know what it’s like. The number of times I didn’t get over the line and the next time I got in, I didn’t feel less pressure, I felt more pressure. And then I didn’t win again, I felt more pressure, and it’s that element that seizes you.

“You know, golf is a game of doubt. You have to live and deal with doubt, and there’s no doubt Rory McIlroy has got that scar tissue in Major championships; he doesn’t have it when he gets to Wells Fargo and the boys are around him; it’s different. That doubt doesn’t scream the way it screams in Majors.

“He’s in a tough spot, and I have a lot of empathy for him because I know, relatively speaking, what it’s like, trying to win one of the big events on the European Tour and I had two or three falls before I got over the line with that win in Valderrama. And you know, it plays on your mind.”

For McGinley, it’s all about sustaining focus for 72 holes. But can Rory do it?

“That’s what the question is,” McGinley says. “He can do it in PGA events, he has won more than anybody else in the last 10 years, comfortably. Miles ahead of anybody else.

“I think if he wins one . . . it’s like a goalscorer who hasn’t scored for a number of matches, and then it goes in off his arse or off his leg or when he’s not looking, and all of a sudden then the floodgates open again.

“It’s exactly the same scenario, that element of doubt seizes you and then the only way to get rid of it is validation because he lives in the real world and when people say, ‘you haven’t won a Major for 10 years’, he goes, ‘yeah, I know, nobody is more aware of it to me’.

“But if he gets a win under his belt, I think it would be a release valve, and should he get one over the line, I expect to see two or three come quickly because, for me, he’s the best player of his era.”

McIlroy was brilliant in last year’s Ryder Cup, hell-bent on proving McGinley’s pre-event talk that his record was “mediocre” was way off track.

“I was doing that on purpose,” says the European Ryder Cup team’s new strategic adviser. “I told Luke I would be the bad guy in the media and dismiss his Ryder Cup record. So Luke invited me and ‘Monty’ [Colin Montgomerie] in to speak to the team one night and straight away, Rory comes up and says, ‘So tell me about my Ryder Cup record? I’ve a f**king average Ryder Cup record?’. And I said, yeah, you have. I told him straight. Look at Luke’s record. Look at Sergio’s record. Far superior to yours.”

Finding a way to focus and perform is the challenge for McIlroy next week. Yes, he has battle scars, but he’s still standing. And he’s still dangerous.

Drive to make Grange into premier venue

Paul McGinley is determined to make Grange Golf Club one of Ireland’s premier parkland venues and bring back top-class amateur championship golf to his old stomping ground.

Working free of charge at the 24-hole south Dublin club that helped him soar to 18th in the world and play three Ryder Cups, the Dubliner and his McGinley Golf Design partner Joe Bedford have helped Grange start a significant investment and development programme as part of its golfing masterplan.

Since 2018, €3.6m has been invested in renovating 10 holes on its Love Course, the original 18 created by the great James Braid, and developing new practice and course-maintenance facilities.

The club, which was established in 1910 and has 1,400 members, has 24 holes set on 155 acres in the foothills of the Dublin mountains in Rathfarnham.

The original par-68 course has six par threes – a feature that helped McGinley become statistically rated the best par-three player in the world in 2005.

But with six academy holes allowing the members to play two loops of 12 in winter and with two of those holes used to create the Sheahan Course that eliminates the par-three first and second, the plan is to find Grange’s ideal 18.

“We have aspirations to be one of the premier inland courses in Ireland and in a few years, I’d be confident we could host the big amateur events here,” said McGinley, who is carrying out the work free of charge as “a payback to the club for the platform they gave me”.

Protecting the club’s borders by buying an old rectory near the 10th fairway and building a new maintenance facility has eaten into the budget.

But with consensus from the members, McGinley’s big hope is that they can agree on the best championship 18 for Grange and bring back events such as the AIG Irish Men’s Close, last played there in 1970 when a favourite son, Walker Cup player David Sheahan defeated Edmondstown’s Mark Bloom.