Update: Sometimes Golf Does Love You Back!
Photo by Richard Heathcote/Getty Images
Last June I wrote about Rory McIlroy’s dramatic U.S. Open loss to LIV Tour star Bryson DeChambeau that served as a metaphor for the present state of the world and golf as a whole, as I detailed some of my own Rory-style experience in how golf will never love you back. McIlroy completed three fourths of the vaunted career grand slam quickly to start his career, and after winning the third leg eleven years ago, he trained his eye on the Masters. Winning golf’s greatest tournament would place him on its Mount Olympus alongside Jack Nicklas, Tiger Woods, Gene Sarazen, Gary Player and Ben Hogan as the only players to ever win all four majors. The most tries it took any of them to complete the career grand slam was three, as their dominance defined their eras.
Rory is another story entirely, requiring eleven tries to join golf immortality. He is not the only golfer who came into the Masters one major short of a career grand slam, but he is the highest profile one. He fought whatever the good fight counts as in a sport caught between elite American capital and the Saudi Royals, calling out the autocratic regime’s sportswashing for what it is and criticizing players like Bryson DeChambeau who took LIV’s blood money while the PGA Tour pretended they cared about pesky things like morality. That the PGA decided once Rory stuck his neck out for them that they ought to be the one to bring the blade down on it through their deal with LIV made him even more of a sympathetic figure as he was left alone on an island by his own commanders during what he was told was a war. Golf is by far the most difficult sport to find guys genuinely worth rooting for as it is the ultimate and quite literal check-cashing sport, but if anyone had earned the title this decade, it was Rory.
So when he missed two puts that will reverberate throughout history at the U.S. Open last year to hand LIV yet another victory in this hell world we cannot escape form, the golf world’s pain was Rory’s pain. He had already won the U.S. Open in 2011, but the symbolic moment of him being able to hand LIV golf a real metaphorical loss was tough to swallow. Doubly more so when he missed putts to lose it that were short enough that weekend hackers like me are deluded enough to think we could make it (let’s be real, you and I could not keep a putt on a U.S. Open green, let alone hole one out).
RORY ALSO THREE-PUTTS 😮
McIlroy and DeChambeau are now tied at -6. pic.twitter.com/e9n8G9rRC5
— U.S. Open (@usopengolf) June 16, 2024
😱 😱 😱 😱
RORY MISSES ON 18.
Bryson can win the U.S. Open with a par on 18. pic.twitter.com/lSk0ZzzZK2