Rory McIlroy gets the 10th of his 'plenty more chances' to win the US Masters when golf's first men's major of 2021 begins in Augusta on Thursday.
Since the average age to win any of the four Majors is 32 - and McIlroy is 32 next month - those chances don’t look nearly so plentiful as they did after his determinedly optimistic response to that notorious Masters implosion in 2011.
It remains a hugely evocative image, the 21-year-old protégé on the 13th hole, leaning on his driver, devastated at his world crumbling around the loss of six shots in three holes, maybe even at that moment aware of the summary reputation being chiselled out for him.
Three holes earlier he’d led the Masters field until carving an ugly drive. Then he four-putted from a dozen feet on the 12th. The script wrote itself: the kid with all the talent in the world choking when it counted.
It is perhaps sport’s most dreaded tag, a reputation for being brittle under pressure, for choking when it matters most. Being labelled a cheat should be worse but dread of the other ‘c’ word means any anonymous locker-room survey on the topic probably wouldn’t result in unanimity.
It’s why McIlroy’s response to that Masters disaster still resonates.
Just a couple of months later he routed the US Open field by eight shots, with a record low score around a brute of a track. Jason Day was runner-up but basically McIlroy backed himself and it was him first and the rest nowhere.
It ranks with anything any sport has thrown up in terms of resilience and defiance. Down the stretch McIlroy had to be aware he was being examined for every twitch as evidence of supposed frailty. Most would have wilted under such scrutiny. He didn’t falter for a moment.
Flaky
He either embraced the pressure or ignored it. Either way the outcome was a spectacular turnaround in fortunes that should have binned forever any suggestion about the Irishman being flaky.
So it makes no sense 10 years later for that ‘f’ word to be still hanging around him like a bad smell.
McIlroy is a polarising figure. For more than a decade opinions and prejudices have been projected on to him. Some of them have even been about golf. But even in the relatively straightforward business of shooting low he remains a full bag of contradictions.
McIlroy’s either too cocky or too unsure, working too hard for perfection or guilty of not ‘wanting it’ enough, criticised for talking too much or too little, too partial to a sulky excuse or damned as stubborn.
But one charge surely way off the mark is that of flakiness. His defiant response to disaster a decade ago is Exhibit A and surely the only substantial evidence McIlroy will ever need in response to ridiculous charges of being some choker-in-chief.
Ultimately such glib verdicts reflect only disappointed expectations, maybe McIlroy's as much as anyone else's. This is the guy expected to dominate in a way comparable only to Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, a prodigious natural talent requiring only a sprinkle of application to serve.
Four Major titles in four years seemed only right and proper. Augusta got billed as an all but inevitable final step towards becoming the sixth player to complete golf’s career grand slam. And bottom line is that it hasn’t happened.
This is the sixth time he will try to take the final step to golf’s elite and it looks a bigger leap now than ever before.
McIlroy goes in low on confidence and form but typically filled with plans and ambitions.
Months of old fiddling with his swing have been sidelined in favour of fresh fiddling with his swing alongside new coach Pete Cowen. Few ponder more on the mechanics of performance like the man from Holywood, which begs the inevitable question if he's guilty of simply over-thinking it.
Compulsive
Those skewed suspicions of dilettantism are maybe rooted in McIlroy’s instinct to steer away from wanting to be, or pretending to be, the compulsive figure that Woods presented in his pomp, one which saw crazed, hound-dog psychosis get equated with success.
But trusting your intuition like that is hardly the same thing as a lack of seriousness. In fact rather than focussing on the endless mechanical permutations of how best to hit a small ball it is surely worth examining if too much tinkering has taken away the thrill of simply hitting it.
Simplistic advice to just ‘grip it and rip it’ has presumably been doled out by the bucketful before. But no expertise is required to ponder how simply trusting again one of the outstanding natural gifts the game has ever seen might be a better route to glory than endless footling with technicalities.
If nothing else it might be enjoyable, no small factor considering how in recent years golf has appeared too much like a chore.
For all the relentless positivity and meditative mindfulness he talks about, failure to live up to those stratospheric expectations must weigh a little heavier with every bum shot. There’s no fun in it and he looks a player desperately in need of enjoyment on a golf course again.
Of course winning is the most enjoyable part of all. But from a hopelessly inexpert point of view McIlroy seems like he could do with not being afraid to lose. Parking to the side thoughts on fulfilling any Grand Slam destiny might perversely prove the best way to get into a position to get it done.
Because should he once again get into such a position with nine holes to play next Sunday, there is ample evidence of a competitive mind only aching for an opportunity to close out history, settle an old score, and finally and definitively remove that huge weight of expectation from his shoulders.
