ST. ANDREWS, SCOTLAND | The stage was set. The 150th Open was coming to its conclusion at the Old Course, and the most skillful golfer from that continent, and perhaps the most popular, was leading the field. He already held four major titles. Surely Sunday, July 17th at the historic course in Scotland were the day and place where he would add a fifth.
All over Britain, and particularly in Ireland, golf aficionados watched their TV sets and sensed that a wrong was about to be righted. The man who hadn’t won any of golf’s four major titles since 2014 and had arguably remained one of the world’s very best golfers was about to end this barren run. Others of the game’s big prizes had come his way, but now, surely, he would claim one the oldest and grandest of all.
Later McIlroy would reveal that he was staying in Rusacks, the historic hotel on the side of the 18th fairway, and each morning he would open the curtains of his room and imagine seeing his name on top of the leaderboard behind the 18th green. Nick Faldo used to have dreams like that decades ago and thought such dreams were entirely appropriate. Three times Faldo would clasp his hands around the prized trophy, and each time he thought it was no more than he deserved. And last week McIlroy thought the same thing. Nothing wrong with imagining his name at the head of the field, he thought. He deserved it. He had earned it. He had been world No. 1 at the age of 22, was currently ranked second behind Masters champion Scottie Scheffler and now, at age 33, was ready to win once more.
Except that it didn’t quite happen like that. An imp of inspiration sometimes sits on McIlroy’s shoulder, and when it does it spurs him to play startlingly good golf based on long drives - a speciality of McIlroy’s, crisp irons that whistle through the air and good putting. There wasn’t much wrong with his 70 on Sunday except that it wasn’t three strokes lower. Had it been a 66 as he had scored in the first round, say, or a 68 as in the second or a 66 as in the third, then any one of those scores might have been sufficient to see him home over the Old Course and be named as the “champion golfer of the year.”
“I felt like I didn’t do much wrong today, but I didn’t do much right either,” McIlroy said. “It’s one of the days where I played a really controlled round of golf. I did what I felt like I needed to do apart from not capitalising on the easier holes around the turn, the ninth, 12th and 14th.”
The ninth is a short par-4 with a large green, though this being the Old Course it is almost superfluous to make that observation because many greens are enormous. It is said that one of the Old Course’s double greens is large enough to accommodate seven of the greens at Pebble Beach. The 12th is another short par-4 that requires nothing more than an arrow-straight drive to a green with a step in it, and the long par-5 14th has an area of flat fairway known as the Elysian Fields as well as Hell Bunker. These were the holes where McIlroy made his score on Saturday. “If I had made birdies there from good positions [on Sunday] it probably would have been a different story” McIlroy said.
The previous day, he had birdied Nos. 5, 6 and 9 and then holed a bunker shot for an eagle on the 10th, a shot greeted with wild enthusiasm by the spectators. Birdies on the 14th and 18th followed. Joint leader at 16-under par with Viktor Hovland, McIlroy looked quietly confident and calm in a place he had not always been so in the past. Earlier in the week, he had described the Old Course as “a fiddly course, and I generally don’t do well on fiddly courses.” He was doing all right this time.
Less than 24 hours later, he could manage only one birdie on his outward journey. Though he got another on the 10th, the scene of his eagle the day before, he then played par golf to the end. Good golf, mind you. Steady golf, too, but not winning golf. He was not giving this championship to one of his rivals. They had to take it from him. And that is precisely what happened. McIlroy was overtaken by an onrushing Australian train named Cameron Smith who had five birdies in a row starting at the 10th and then added another on the 72nd hole for his margin of victory over runner-up Cameron Young.
Paired with Hovland in the last group of the day, McIlroy could do little more than look and listen to the cheers that kept rolling back to them from Smith and Young in the match ahead. Try as he might, it wasn’t to be his day. He knew Smith was capable of such bursts of low scoring, thanks to some remarkably accurate putting. He had seen Smith do something very similar in winning the Players Championship in March.
Though disappointed, McIlroy was gracious. “Look, I got beaten by a better player this week,” he said. “20-under par for four rounds of golf around here is really, really impressive playing. Particularly to go out and shoot 64 today to get it done.”
McIlroy won an Open Championship, two PGAs and a U.S. Open, all before he turned 26. He is now 33, happily married, a father and an admired figurehead in the game as chairman of the PGA Tour’s Player Advisory Council. More major championships lie in his future even if this one, the one it looked as though he was going to win for three days, was not to be his.
John Hopkins