If this was a popularity contest, then this year would be another Rory McIlroy Green Jacket and it would be so one-sided that he wouldn’t have to put us through all those late Sunday evening heart palpitations again.
Thus it was that at 10.30am local time yesterday, McIlroy stepped on to the 1st tee and received an acclaim that is accorded to golf royalty. No one this century has had the kind of reception here that Tiger Woods had in his pomp, but if Woods was once king, McIlroy now bears the crown.
I stood behind that 1st tee and tried to gauge the noise: Tommy Fleetwood trumped his playing partner, Patrick Reed (well, pretty much anyone would trump Reed, even if he is a former champion), then Bryson DeChambeau trumped Fleetwood, then along came McIlroy and trumped them all.
Fleetwood was four under at the turn but posted a one-under 71 Alamy
This affection for McIlroy is striking, and that is partly because there were heckles greeting him at the Players Championship and that was only a month ago.
The Augusta National, though, has always seemed like another country and the same is true in this respect. They rather like what McIlroy does here and in the first round of his championship defence he gave them Rory golf in spades.
In that regard, he pretty much picked up where he left off 12 months ago. Here was a very typically idiosyncratic exhibition. It was slalom golf where you could never tell where McIlroy was going to stick his drive and then how he was going to perform the next escapology act.
In his interview afterwards he did concede that he had been “hitting out of the trees a little bit”. Thanks for pointing that out, Rory, but it hadn’t actually gone unnoticed.
But it worked. That’s the point. The route McIlroy takes to the pin doesn’t matter. What matters is that when he finished he was peering down at the field from atop the leaderboard. The attempt to go back to back is on, even if it does entail going a bit left to right and then a bit right to left in the process.
McIlroy was straight into the groove on the 2nd: a drive so far right that he missed the right-side fairway bunker and was in among the pines and the needles where he is apparently so comfortable. Then he went from the right-side rough into the left-side crowd, gave himself a 70-yard pitch, hit that to three feet and came away with birdie.
McIlroy found the pine straw at the 13th off the tee but still made birdie…Reuters
The best example of Rory golf was the 15th. If he was trying to recreate his famous 15th from Sunday last year, he got it wrong, because his drive went so far left that there wasn’t even a chance of that miracle shot back round the pines. No matter, he punched one low through the trees, pitched in to 29 feet and holed the putt. Another birdie. That was his third in a row.
He won’t do it the orthodox way. Maybe he just can’t do it the orthodox way. He certainly can’t when his driver is such a liability. Last year his modus operandi was to rescue himself with fearless irons. Here it was more the quality of his pitch shot and the heat in his putter.
While he was on that hot streak of three consecutive birdies, Scottie Scheffler was just getting going, ten holes behind him, and also making good early work of the leaderboard. But the footholds that Scheffler tends to find on his ascent are those you are supposed to locate. McIlroy spots them where no one had dreamt they existed. But that’s why they celebrate Rory golf here so heartily.
McIlroy is bidding to become only the fourth player after Jack Nicklaus, Nick Faldo and Tiger Woods to win back-to-back MastersAlamy
What was different from last year? Well, by this time last year he had already chucked in the first two double bogeys, he had already established the rollercoaster pattern: the dramatic rises up the leaderboard and then the sudden implosions.
This time? No double bogeys. Only one single bogey and that was on the 3rd, where many were struggling. This time, nothing flustered him, at least nothing seemed to fluster him.
He did concede that this had been something of an act: his hand was still shaking when he put the tee peg in the ground on the 1st and then when he balanced the ball on the tee. But that’s good, he explained: comfortable is counterproductive.
He also conceded that he had squeezed the most out of an imperfect day. “A fair score,” he said, “would have been two under.”
If we are trying to work out if he is or isn’t more dangerous than before, then here’s something of an answer. A defending champion who knows how to get it done here and can turn a two-under round into five-under — that’s dangerous. He also said that his round had corroborated his opinion that “winning a Masters makes it easier to win your second one”.
So you could definitely mount an argument that this was last year’s McIlroy but just a better version. Well, you could do. But that would be presuming that he really has changed, and it’s too early for any such assumptions. McIlroy is still McIlroy. McIlroy has shown us again that he can win the Masters; it wouldn’t be McIlroy if he didn’t show us at some point that he can lose it too.
McIlroy’s best shot of the day? Maybe his second to the 9th. That’s the devilish pitch that so many were struggling on, because the pin was back left and getting a ball to stay there was apparently impossible. But McIlroy hit a colossal drive, gave himself just over 100 yards and then stuck his second into a tiny landing area above the pin, which cradled the ball back towards the hole.
Brilliant, utterly brilliant. But a most orthodox birdie, a very un-McIlroy birdie. If he can find more of those too, then this title defence really can run all the way. Even if it is, slightly too often, a title defence that is running from side to side.