At the K Club, Rory McIlroy is the lightbulb and the rest of us are flies. As he does his round of media duties on pro-am day, there is at all times that quiet, imperceptible sense of people drawn in, as close as they dare. All of them trying not to intrude, but at the same time trying desperately hard to be in his orbit.
At one stage, as he is politely rattling through his couple of answers for the chap from NBC Golf, a gang of maybe a dozen people break off from the 10th fairway to inch closer to him. They’re not eavesdropping, exactly. It’s more like they’re paddling in the shallows of McIlroy’s life for a few seconds, seeing if the water can possibly feel the same between their toes as between his.
To be honest, I think the finish at The Scottish Open this year was better just under the circumstances
By the time he’s finished with Greg Allen of RTÉ, the small gang has swollen to a mini-crowd. Kids, the young kind and the old kind. Probably around 30 of them in total. All of them slanting their bodies towards McIlroy, straining their necks, listening so intently you’d think he was a world leader explaining his case for war rather than a golfer giving his take on Luke Donald’s picks for the Ryder Cup team.
In situations like this, he feels a bit like a museum piece. For these few minutes, the people who have wandered over are all standing within 10-to-15 feet of him. And yet, when he’s done, none of them asks for an autograph or jumps in for a selfie or even shouts a “G’wan Rory” in his direction. It’s as though they’re looking in at his world from afar, rather than sharing the same few square feet of Kildare land.
Fame is a forcefield like that. It’s reasonable to assume that everyone who walks through the gates of the K Club this week spends at least some portion of their leisure time rooting for McIlroy on the TV. And so it’s maybe no surprise that even as they walk alongside him, they feel somehow at a remove.
Yet he is here, ready to put a peg in the ground. An Irish Open with Rory McIlroy playing in it has a completely different weight to it than one he skips. Attaching the gravity of Planet Rory to an otherwise common-or-garden tour event transforms it. He knows that, everyone knows that. We ask if he feels obligated in any way.
I’m not going to guarantee that I’m going to play [the Irish Open] every single year. It just has to fit with what I want to do
“I have before,” he concedes. “I felt pressure to turn up, but at the end of the day I can only do what I think is right for myself. But I certainly think by having the tournament at this time of the year, it will be likelier that I will come back to play.
“I think with it being in September, it’s nice to come over here for two weeks and play here, and then play Wentworth next week. As long as it fits what I’m trying to do – I got off to a great start this year in The Race to Dubai, I want to try to win that. So every event I do play in Europe is sort of getting me closer to that goal as well.
“I’d like to think that I’m going to come back most years to play the Irish Open, but I’m not going to guarantee that I’m going to play every single year. It just has to fit with what I want to do, and fit with all the other things that I’ve got going on in my life as well.”
This is, famously, the venue at which he has won his only Irish Open. In his press conference here, he referenced once again the fact that 2016 was special for his family because this is the tournament his mother always wanted him to win. She was here for it that day, as she is again this week. And yet, he is never one to overdo the sentimentality of it all.
That much is clear when he is later asked if his spectacular finish here in 2016 – a pair of stunning second shots over water to the long 16th and 18th – was better than his birdie-birdie finish at this year’s Scottish Open. The easiest thing in the world would have been to throw out a little red meat for the home fans and plump for 2016 – there’s a plaque on the 16th fairway here in his honour, after all. But after a bit of a hum and a haw, he goes the other way.
An Irish Open with Rory McIlroy playing in it has a completely different weight to it than one he skips
“To be honest, I think the finish at The Scottish Open this year was better just under the circumstances. Here, I had two par-5s to play and two good chances. [But] 17 and 18 at the Renaissance, I think they were playing two of the toughest holes on the day.”
Even there, in a fun but ultimately trivial question, McIlroy’s instinct is to give an honest answer rather than to play the crowd-pleaser. It sums up his particular type of fame, too. He knows – as everyone knows – that the Irish golf public don’t need his plamás.
They only want to see him be Rory McIlroy, from whatever distance they can tune in.
