- Rory McIlroy dramatically called off his divorce from wife Erica Stoll on Tuesday
- The Northern Irishman is now hoping to win his fifth major title at the US Open
It was on Tuesday that Rory McIlroy said success at this week’s US Open would come from ‘embracing the boring’. A few hours later he proved yet again that nothing is ever dull for long in his orbit.
Much like Erik ten Hag and the football club McIlroy has supported since he was a boy, it would seem the world No 3 and his wife of seven years, Erica, have opted against a divorce after all.
That he chose to share such a personal development in the days before taking on the season’s third major carried an echo of the decision to file his petition to end their marriage on the Monday prior to the US PGA Championship last month.
Naturally, those are undulations that exist in his private life, but they have developed a recent knack of entering conversations around his professional form.
When he tees up at Pinehurst on Thursday, no reminder will be necessary that a decade has passed since his fourth major win, not least because he has been grouped for the first two rounds with Scottie Scheffler and Xander Schauffele, who have claimed the past two.
Time was that an assumption existed around McIlroy, with the prevailing feeling that his best game would have the beating of anyone in golf. Scheffler’s purple patch has dramatically distorted that line of thinking, which was a view supported in these pages by the former European Ryder Cup captain Paul McGinley ahead of the US PGA.
But McGinley also said that in the right frame of mind, with a few good bounces, the Northern Irishman remains supremely equipped at 35 to land that elusive fifth title.
If he does land it, McGinley believes McIlroy’s story will mimic ‘the striker in a goal drought who knocks one in off his backside’ and goes on a streak, and that only a bit of big-stage confidence is in the way. That and Scheffler, of course.
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For such reasons, it was noted with some encouragement by those present in North Carolina this week that McIlroy has had a spring in his step. That he was sporting a jauntier, happier disposition than he carried into the US PGA, where he arrived on the back of a PGA Tour win at Quail Hollow but whose narrative was immediately hijacked by court papers pointing to an ‘irretrievably broken’ marriage.
A tie for 12th was credible in those circumstances, but inevitably there is a curiosity now around whether McIlroy will go better, given he is moving towards greater stability at home where he has a three-year-old daughter, Poppy. By its nature, that is an invasive discussion rooted in pseudo psychology, but it is one he himself chose to put on the table on Tuesday night by telling The Guardian: ‘There have been rumours about my personal life recently, which is unfortunate. Responding to each rumour is a fool’s game.
‘Over the past weeks, Erica and I have realised that our best future was as a family together. Thankfully, we have resolved our differences and look forward to a new beginning.’
It is tempting to link that situation to his brighter mood earlier in the day, when he said: ‘Obviously getting my hands on a fifth major has taken quite a while, but I’m more confident than ever I’m right there, that I’m as close as I’ve ever been.’
That was part of a broader answer to the question of whether he still has defined career goals, with the associated undertone he has won almost everything in golf multiple times in the decade when the most important tally of all has gone unchanged.
‘I’ve always said I still feel like being the most successful European in the game is within my reach,’ he said. ‘I’ve got obviously Seve (Ballesteros, five major wins) and Nick Faldo (six) to pass there in terms of major wins. I wouldn’t say I’ve got a particular number of wins. I think the only thing about trying to pick a number is that you’re setting yourself up for failure or disappointment.
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‘Tiger (Woods) wanted to surpass Jack (Nicklaus). It looks like he might not get there, but are we going to call Tiger’s career a failure? Absolutely not. It’s arguably the best. He’s played the best golf anyone’s ever seen.
‘There’s always going to be that tinge of what could have been. I don’t want to do that to myself. If someone had told me at 20 years old I’d be sitting here at 35 and this is the career I’ve had, I would have been ecstatic. I still have a good bit of time here, hopefully the next 10 years. I like to think I’ve got a good run ahead of me.
‘Whatever the totals add up to, I’ll feel like I’ve done pretty well for a little boy from Northern Ireland who dreamed of playing golf for a living one day.’
It was a good response to a familiar enquiry. Just as there was amusement in his comment that the only thing that interrupted the ‘relentlessness’ of Scheffler recently was ‘going into a jail cell for an hour’ prior to his second round at the US PGA. Then again, McIlroy’s media performances at the majors have often made for appointment viewing, even in weeks when he has offered less on the course.
This week has a whiff of promise about it, which would have been the case irrespective of a change in McIlroy’s domestic situation. Having conditioned himself to ‘embrace’ the patience demanded by the unique challenges of a US Open set-up, this tournament has often drawn his best results — after winning in 2011, he missed four cuts in the next seven bids but has since gone ninth, eighth, seventh, fifth and second.
At Pinehurst, where so much of the test will be on the approaches to those fiendish greens, and by extension the chipped recoveries to putting surfaces shaped like upturned saucers, McIlroy has the game and strategic nous to flourish.
If he has recently acquired a greater internal balance to go with it, only he knows, but it will presumably help in the great sporting challenge of stopping Scheffler without the benefit of police assistance.