Rory McIlroy reflects on a season of historic triumphs – including a career grand slam – but admits there was one moment on the course that left him so shaken it took months to recover from.
As Rory McIlroy prepares to tee it up for the final time in 2025, he is in reflective mood.
“It’s been the year of my dreams, really,” he said ahead of the Australian Open in Melbourne. “I’ve waited so long to try to complete that career grand slam, so to finally get over that line… But then also all of the other stuff: winning a Players Championship, and being part of a European Ryder Cup team to win in America was something that I really wanted to do and be a part of.”
In a career littered with highlights, McIlroy feels this year might be his best ever.
“Hopefully it’s not, but it could well go down as the highest point or the best year of my career,” he said. “I still don’t feel like I’m finished yet, and it would be nice to have similar years to this in the future, but I’ll always look back on 2025 and think it was the top, or if not, near the top of what I’ve done in the game.”
Processing the green jacket
Almost eight months on from his Masters triumph, McIlroy is still grappling with the emotions of ending such a long wait for the green jacket.
“Some of it’s a blur. Some of it I’ve tried to forget. And some of it I’ve tried to keep in the memory bank,” he revealed.
“I remember all of it, and I’ve tried not to watch it back too much, because I feel like when you watch it back a lot, you don’t remember it through your eyes and through your feelings – you remember it through watching what you’ve seen on TV.
“I’ve tried not to watch it back too much, but every time I see that scene on the 18th green, it still gets me a little emotional and choked up, because when you’ve wanted something for so long and it finally comes, just that release of emotion was very, very cool.”
The pressure cooker
McIlroy does not hide the intensity of the challenge he faced in closing out Augusta.
“Honestly, I never want to feel like that on a golf course again,” he admitted. “Your legs are weak and you feel like you want to throw up.”
Even with victory, he says part of him wanted the chance to finish it in a more commanding fashion.
“The battle that day was with myself. I stood on that 13th tee with a four or five-shot lead, and I’d love to be in that position again and see if I could finish it off the right way.
“But I think if I was ever going to win the Masters, [with] my journey in that tournament, there was never going to be a way that I won the Masters where it was going to be smooth sailing. It was always going to be this sort of roller coaster, and it probably was the appropriate way for it to happen.”
Losing his way – and finding his next goal
While winning the Masters fulfilled a lifelong dream, McIlroy admits it knocked him off track for a while.
“I climbed my Everest in April, and I think after you do something like that, you’ve got to make your way back down, and you’ve got to look for another mountain to climb,” he said.
“It’s an amazing feeling when it happens, and obviously that sort of afterglow lasts for quite a while, but then you have to realize that life goes on.
“I’ve always been a goal setter, and I feel like I can get a little bit lost if I don’t have a direction or something that I’m striving towards. And honestly, I’d say for the couple of months after the Masters, I felt a little bit directionless.
“I was just trying to enjoy it so much, but four weeks go by and you’re trying to get ready for the next major championship … just time goes on and you have to reassess your goals and reset, and I probably didn’t do as good a job of that as I could have.”
McIlroy says it’s not the first time he’s let a post-high comedown affect him, having experienced the same when he first became world number one.
“It was a goal of mine for the season, starting off in 2012, and I ended up getting to world No.1 at the end of February, so it was this really quick ascension,” he said.
“And I remember getting up the next morning and being like, ‘Is this it?’ I thought it was going to change my life. I thought it was going to feel different, and it didn’t. I was like, ‘I have to go and brush my teeth, just like I did yesterday morning.’
“It was the same thing. But that was a good lesson and a good reminder that you can have these goals and have things that you want to achieve, but then what comes next? And what comes next is that you have got to go and do it all over again.
“I think that’s the thing that separates the good sports people from the ones that want to be great, that never-ending ambition just to want to try to get better and do more.”
Looking forward
McIlroy has now overcome his Masters hangover and is looking forward once more with a fresh set of goals.
“The nice thing is with winning the Masters, you get to go back every year, and I’d love to have another chance to win another one,” he said.
But Augusta is far from his only target.
“I’ve talked about trying to win at some of the most important venues in golf,” he said when asked about his goals now that he’s ticked off the grand slam.
“This week is one of them. You think about the tournaments and the people that have won at Royal Melbourne, and I think it is highly regarded within the golf world.
“I was lucky enough to win at Pebble Beach this year for the first time. Obviously, at Augusta.
“I’d love to win at St Andrews one day. I’d love to win a US Open at Pebble Beach. There’s a few venues that mean a bit more than some of the others, and that’s something I’d love to do one day.
“I want to win more majors. I want to be part of more Ryder Cup teams.”
McIlroy, who won his seventh DP World Tour Order of Merit recently, has been widely tipped to overtake Colin Montgomerie’s total of eight, but the Northern Irishman insists it’s not a key focus.
“I’d say my records on either tour – whether it be the DP World Tour or the PGA Tour – are meaning a little less to me as time moves on,” he explained. “It’s really just focusing on the majors and being part of that Ryder Cup team and trying to build on a legacy that I think will last 50 years.”
Golf ‘ripping itself apart’
McIlroy also addressed the ongoing divide between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf, emphasising his desire to see the best players compete against each other.
“I’ve spent some time with Adam [Scott] on the Board of the PGA Tour, trying to make that as good as it can be. And you’ve got these other tours – obviously LIV – and I think what LIV has done here in Australia has been amazing.
“Their tournament in Adelaide looks absolutely incredible, and especially in a country that has been starved of big-time golf events, I think they’ve done a really, really good job.
“But for me, I didn’t like the fracture in the game and the fact that the only time that all the best players get to go up against each other is in the four major championships. I feel like it needs to be more than that.
“Golf needs to be relevant more than four times a year, and that’s my big concern. I just don’t want it to rip itself apart.
“I commend people for trying different things and trying something new, but I don’t think golf was broken to begin with. But hopefully we can get there.
“It has been a complicated time, but I think everyone just wants to see the best players in the world compete against each other.”
It’s clear that even after a season few could match, Rory McIlroy’s fire for the game burns brighter than ever – and the next challenge is already calling.
