Did you make it to the end? The last putt dropped at 2.52am – were you there? Did you hang on in to the death on the couch, propped up by cushions, raddled with coffee, dangling by the last gossamer thread of hope that maybe Wyndham Clark would find a way to let Rory McIlroy back in through the door?
There’s something about watching sport in the dead of night. Every minute you stay up is one you’re not getting back. Every just-one-more-hole is a swatch you’ve torn out of the following day. There’s that gnawing sense that you’re stealing from yourself. Raiding your own jewellery box for diamonds that turn to sand the second you touch them.
And for what? Is this fun? Is this enjoyment? Rory McIlroy filled the night with five hours of Major Sunday Rory McIlroy. Which is to say, he was one of the best golfers on the planet. He just wasn’t the best – or at least not close enough to it for long enough to win.
He beat 154 golfers across the week. Clark beat 155. Just like at St Andrew’s last summer when Cam Smith beat 154 and McIlroy beat 153. Or Augusta a few months previously when Scottie Scheffler beat 89 players and McIlroy beat 88. We could go on. And on. And on.
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Everyone knows the beats of this thing by now. Failure to win another major has turned into the defining label attached to McIlroy out amongst the general public. He takes more incoming fire for getting close to glory than someone like Shane Lowry gets for staying stuck in the pack.
This was McIlroy’s 19th top 10 in a major since he last won one in 2014. That’s 19 times out of 33. Brooks Koepka is clearly the best major golfer across that timespan – he has 18 top 10s, five of them outright wins. But McIlroy has had vanishingly few peers when it comes to performing in the toughest weeks in the sport across the past decade. Yet somehow he has become a byword for failure on the biggest stage.
The game is about winning. You put yourself in position enough times, you ought to be able to see it out. Clark’s best finish in a major before last night was 78th – McIlroy had the experience, the know-how and the skills to surely be able to find a way to play one shot less than him somewhere along the way.
But not only could he not do that on Sunday, he didn’t manage it on Saturday or Friday either. Ultimately, the difference between the pair was Clark’s Thursday 64 as against McIlroy’s 65. Clark’s last shot on Thursday night was a 25-foot putt across the 18th green that was turning left at the hole and only just caught enough of it to dive in. From there to the end of the tournament, he and McIlroy shot exactly the same score every day.
The point is, golf is stupid. Really, chronically, gloriously dumb. These tournaments are decided by millimetres, meaning that whole careers are weighed up and mused upon on the back of actions that deviate by no more than the width of your thumbnail. It’s hilarious really that we attach such outsized significance to such tiny slices of happenstance.
None of which ought to excuse McIlroy for not winning here. His putting was not good enough when it mattered – the numbers say he was 57th out of 65 players in the field yesterday with the flat stick. Clark only had to be 37th in the putting stats on Sunday to beat him. McIlroy’s long putting was exceptional but it’s a bad day’s work when you’re frequently closer to holing from 60 feet than from 20.
And because he didn’t putt well, he was never able to put enough pressure on Clark to really make him feel the weight of his first ever time contending in a major. Clark pulled off some stunning escapes down the stretch but he did them all knowing that he had a cushion.
He was always at least a shot ahead of McIlroy who was playing just a couple of hundred yards in front of him. Clark never felt the earth move from a roar up ahead. He never had to chase in a way he wasn’t comfortable doing. As a result, to borrow a line from the golf writer Shane Ryan, McIlroy’s was a death by a thousand pars.
So on we go. This stupid game, this brilliant, maddening, vulnerable, elite Irish sportsperson. He’s 34 now and the game is trending younger all the time – Clark makes it 11 major winners under 30 out of the past 14. McIlroy surely has more chances behind him than in front of him. There will come a time when he’s not a factor in these tournaments any more and we’ll not have to stay up to all hours to grab a piece of it.
And what will we do then? Sleep?
Sure what good will that do us?
