Rory McIlroy rarely disappoints when he gets a microphone in front of him and is in a reflective mood.
The Northern Irishman delivered the goods in a wide-ranging interview on the podcast “Stick to Football” with former footballer Roy Keane, among others.
Rory McIlroy on winning the Masters:
“It felt like it was then or never. And it probably wasn’t, even if I didn’t go on to win, but it would have been one more bad memory and more scar tissue building up there for me.”
“Never in my wildest dreams did I think that I’d be in a playoff with Justin Rose. Right? You know, Rosie played great that day. I thought it was really just going to be between me and Bryson. It obviously didn’t pan out that way. But I thought that Bryson was going to be my biggest obstacle to doing it.”
On rinsing his third shot at 13 and making a disastrous double bogey:
“And I said to my caddy, Harry, walking up to the 13th tee, usually you see people go for that green in two and you can make it. But I said to him, what do you think about playing this as a three-shotter? So it was the first time I was thinking a little bit defensively.”
“But when I got down there, it had settled. There’s these drainage hollows by the left side of the fairway and it was on the upslope of one of those.
“And usually when you’re hitting wedge shots off an upslope with the loft of the club, the ball comes out left. So I was trying to guard against that a little bit. So I give myself maybe a yard or two of like a margin for error on the right side of the pin.
“And I just got ahead of it, made a bad swing. And I mean, I had, you know, my dad said to me after you had all of Georgia on your left and you hit it right.”
Q: What were you thinking when that happened?
“I thought I hit a similar wedge shot at the U.S. Open in 2023 that lost me the U.S. Open. And I thought I’ve done it again. Like you idiot, I’ve done it again.
“So it just, again, like the reason that I started to play defensive on 13 is because I remember what I’ve done on 13 before and I’ve hit it in that creek too many times or up in those azaleas, you know, so it just, it plays with your head a bit.”
Downplaying his brilliant roped 7-iron shot at 15:
“If I didn’t turn it enough, it would have went into the right bunker, which actually wasn’t a bad miss. So, like it was still, it was an incredible shot, but I knew I had a little bit of a bailout. All I needed to do was focus on hitting, making sure I struck it well, so that it would get over the water.
“That was the biggest thing, but it came out perfect. And yeah, that was really, that was the shot that turned it around, that got some momentum again, that helped me go on to win.”
On wearing the Green Jacket to India, Australia, Ireland and on Halloween:
“I mean, I’ve brought it around the globe. And I wore it on Halloween. My daughter wanted to be Galinda from Wicked. So I was like, well, I’ll be the wizard of all of them.”
On rules and regulations for wearing the Green Jacket outside of the club:
“You have to sign a legal document to take it off, to take it out of the club.
“And there’s do’s and don’ts with it. You have to wear a certain shirt, and you have to wear a club tie, and certain trousers, you only wear dress shoes. You can’t wear trainers. You can’t just throw it on, go for the bevy.”
On being the sixth member of the Career Grand Slam club:
“Insane. You sort of, even now, you hear those names and feel like you get imposter syndrome. You’re like, I’m not supposed to be on that list. But it is. It’s incredible. And it’s cool as well.
“Like, there’s, you know, six have done it. There are four living. And, yeah, the one thing I want to do is I want to get the four of us that are living, Jack, Gary, Tiger, myself, and, you know, do a picture at Augusta next year with our green jackets on.”
On LIV not resonating for him and others:
“I said on this podcast last time that maybe I was a bit too judgmental of the guys that went because not everyone is in the same position that I’m in. So, you know, you get offered double the money to do the same job. Sort of hard to, hard to turn down. But it just hasn’t, I think the thing is with live is hasn’t really resonated with people. I think there’s some good elements to it.
“But it just hasn’t, you know, it captured the imagination.
“Yeah, I don’t know, you know, and like I’ve watched a little bit of it and it’s just, it’s not, I don’t know. And maybe it’s just I’m too much of a traditionalist to get it.
“But it just doesn’t seem to have anything. Like they were coming into the game saying, we’re gonna be different, we’re gonna be this, we’re gonna be that. And it’s not, you know, even the fact they’ve now switched from 54 holes to 72 holes to get world ranking points. So it’s like, you’re just doing what everyone else is doing. So what’s different, you know, apart from the money?”
On the chances for a deal with LIV and the return of LIV players:
“I think at the end of the day, they just want a seat at the table. So how do you give them a seat at the table? And try to mend the fracture? But still, it’s hard. You’re trying to give everyone a win. But I think to give everyone a win, everyone’s gonna feel like they’ve lost. So that’s the hard thing. But they’ve spent so much, I think about this, they’ve spent billions on Liv, like the PIF and so on.
“If LIV is failing to capture the imagination and they’ve spent so much money on this venture and it isn’t making a return for them, you know, I don’t know how much longer they can keep it going.
Q: Would the players, would you accept the players back into the Tour as they want to come back in, or do you think there’s a, there is a consequence of joining?
“Well, I mean, they’ve made the money, but they’ve paid their consequence in terms of the … you know, you talk about the reputation and some of the things that they’ve lost by going over there. If it made the overall Tour stronger to have Bryson DeChambeau back and whoever else I would be okay with it, but again, it’s not just me, and I recognize that not everyone’s in my position, so, you know, it would be up to the, you know, the collective group of PGA Tour members to make that decision.”
McIlroy on the Ryder Cup, and a ‘mob mentality’:
“On Friday night and Saturday night, after the stuff that we heard on the course, I think there was an opportunity for either Keegan or some of the teammates to be like, let’s just calm down here. Let’s try to play this match in the right spirit. And some of them did that, but obviously Keegan had the biggest platform of the week of being the captain, and I feel like he could have said something on that Friday or Saturday night, and he didn’t. But in fairness, Sunday was a little bit better. Like it seemed like the rhetoric was sort of calmed down a bit.”
