Rory McIlroy’s 11-year journey to golfing immortality

The hair is greyer, the body is as toned yet perhaps more defined, and the collapse to the ground clearly has more emotion as he finally completes the extraordinary journey to career grand slam immortality.

But the images of Rory McIlroy winning the 2014 US PGA Championship and Rory McIlroy prevailing at the 2025 Masters have more similarities than differences. A golfing genius doing what he does and for which his talent was born – celebrating on the game’s biggest stage.

However, any ‘spot the difference’ puzzle cannot begin to sum up a period that eventually led to one of the greatest comebacks on the fairways. A time when McIlroy never left the elite – indeed, during which he, for so long, lorded over his rivals – but unfathomably could not take what seemed the rational, if not straightforward, step of turning four majors into five.

Of course, in a sport that was already established enough in the 16th Century to be played by Mary, Queen of Scots – she enjoyed a round at St Andrews the day after her husband, Lord Darnley, was murdered – 11 years can hardly be classed as an era or even an epoch. Yet for those of us who lived and reported our way through this timeframe, it sometimes felt like a never-ending story.

Except, it did end on Sunday, so it is worth zooming back to chart McIlroy’s mysterious major malfunctions, if only to underline the magnitude of what we witnessed when he took down Bryson DeChambeau and made that giant step to join Ben Hogan, Gene Sarazen, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods in the pantheon of career Grand Slam winners.

An appropriate place to recount this tortuous tale might be before The Open at Royal Troon in 2016. It said plenty about his grandeur as a youngster – he had, alongside Nicklaus and Woods, become one of three players to win four majors by the age of 25 – that his record was so soon being questioned.

McIlroy finished 2014 having won back-to-back majors, with a World Golf Championship title in the middle, and marching tall as Paul McGinley’s predominant hero in Europe’s Ryder Cup victory. But then, just two years on, the golfing landscape had altered.

“It’s amazing, it wasn’t that long since we were sitting here thinking ‘Rory’s the new Tiger, he’s our new superstar’ and it only seemed a matter of how far into double figures he would go with majors,” McGinley told Telegraph Sport at the time. “But then, last year it suddenly all became about Jordan [Spieth] with his two majors, then by the conclusion of 2015 and first few months of 2016, it was all about Jason [Day] with his major and run, and now it’s all about Dustin [Johnson] with his US Open breakthrough and then the WGC in Akron. Rory must wonder what’s happened.”

In fairness, this was hardly a tumble off a cliff and there were external factors. With the Holywood superstar there invariably are. His infamous ankle injury in July 2015, suffered in a kickabout with friends, precluded him from defending the Claret Jug at his beloved St Andrews and then from being able to mount a legitimate challenge in his US PGA defence. Yet that is sport and, regardless, McGinley believed the forthcoming examinations were so crucial to his career.

“I tell you what, these next three weeks are going to be very important for Rory,” McGinley said. “If he goes through these without winning, that’ll be two years without a major and that’s going to hurt him hard. I don’t think Rory’s game has actually gone off that much – he won five times last year – it’s just that these guys have raised their game so much, that as a consequence Rory no longer has the confidence that he knows he’s better than everyone else.”

At that stage, Johnson, Spieth, Day and McIlroy were labelled “The Fab Four” and Telegraph Sport – as it turned out, foolishly – warned that McIlroy was in danger of being cast as Ringo. Fortunately, he saw the funny side, but the drumbeat did not change as he finished fifth at Troon – 16 shots behind Henrik Stenson – and missed the cut at the US PGA.

There was a first FedEx Cup – essentially the PGA Tour order of merit – to celebrate and its $10 million bonus, but 2017 came and went without a victory of any kind, the only time since his first full year as a pro.

There was a rib injury to blame, but even that came with ridicule. McDonald’s had just released their “McRib” range and a few podcasts went viral with the inevitable joke. It did not help that he was diagnosed with a heart irregularity in the off-season. Telegraph Sport was admonished by his camp for reporting it. Apparently sponsors were getting jumpy.

Nevertheless that four-month break, his longest so far, rejuvenated his spirits and in January 2018, I interviewed him in his Dubai flat. “I won four majors from 2011 to 2014 and everyone was saying ‘that’s Tiger pace’,” he said. “And I realise everyone knows I haven’t won one in the last three years and that is a worry, yeah. I need to get back on that track and this year my goals are to add to my major tally and get back to world No 1, winning more times than anyone else.

“It’s simple, there are no excuses with my game or my private life. I’ve had the best time of my life in the last few months.”

It had begun with a road trip through Italy with wife, Erica – in a wedding present of a 1950 Mercedes SL – and then the McIlroys bought Ernie Els’s home just along the freeway from their own residence in West Palm Beach. ‘So what went wrong, Rory?’ sounded as daft as ever. But while the silverware returned – one in 2018 and four in 2019, when he returned to world No 1 – the major drought ticked on.

At least he actually contended a few times; going out in the last group of the final round of the 2018 Masters, before being put in his place by Patrick Reed and then finishing tied-second behind Francesco Molinari at that year’s Open. But on neither occasion was he involved down the stretch, and even though his Ryder Cup legend was growing, he was brilliant in Paris in 2018, he went through Covid with another potless year.

In the meanwhile, Brooks Koepka had been collecting majors with unreasonable haste. The Fab Four? Koepka was Elvis.

As far as McIlroy went, with his coach since childhood, Michael Bannon, unable to travel, he looked lost and with a new band emerging – while Collin Morikawa won the US PGA in 2020 and the Open in 2021, DeChambeau won the 2020 US Open and Jon Rahm the US Open in 2021, there was also a young man called Scottie Scheffler earning rave reviews – something had to give.

He employed Yorkshireman Pete Cowen to fix a two-way miss off the tee and to try to solve his glaring weakness with short-iron approaches. But although there was the odd promising triumph, by the end of the 2021 Ryder Cup in Wisconsin he was crying in a TV interview, devastated that he had performed so poorly.

McIlroy trotted back a few paces and found his feet again, with Bannon returning and Dr Bob Rotella – the great sports psychologist whom he had previously worked with – also back in his camp. Brad Faxon, the former US Ryder Cup player, was his putting guru and an interest in stoicism and self-help books strengthened and emboldened his psyche. He was ready to resume the fight, but, with a bang, the battle came off the course when LIV Golf was formed.

With the PGA Tour bigwigs pathetically hiding away from the existential threat, McIlroy gallantly emerged as the voice of the opposition, taking on the Saudi-funded circuit each and every time a new multimillion-dollar signing jumped ship. He told LIV chief executive Greg Norman to resign and to “allow the adults in the room”, and exclaimed “f--- you” in the direction of defector-in-chief Phil Mickelson on Netflix.

That was a documentary, but his career and so his life was becoming a soap opera. He cried in his wife’s arms when Australian Cam Smith – himself a future LIV rebel – denied him in 2022 at the 150th Open at the Home of Golf.

At the 2023 PGA Championship he was despondent in the clubhouse when realising Koepka had usurped him as the most prolific major-winner of the time, on five. “F--k, someone in my era has got more majors than I have,” he said to manager Sean O’Flaherty and caddie Harry Diamond in the Oak Hill locker room. “I feel good enough to f------ top-10 in my head, but not good enough to win. Like pull away. Like winning f------ major championships.”

His soul was laid bare and somehow even more of it would soon be stripped away. In the 2023 US Open, Wyndham Clark denied him by a shot and although the FedEx titles were racking up as quickly as the greenback – conservative estimates have his fortune at $600 million – the personal Rubicon declined to be crossed.

McIlroy’s career became this weird paradox of consistent success and wretched failure and when, in a stunning announcement a few days before last year’s US PGA, it was revealed that he had filed for divorce from Erica, the mother of their toddler daughter, Poppy – there was nothing else to deduce but chaos.

McIlroy was playing well enough, but he was a mile off Scheffler, who had become undisputed world No 1 with a Tiger-eseque run which included Green Jackets at the 2022 and 2024 Masters. The motivation levels must have been bankrupt, especially with Xander Schauffele strolling a direct path to the Wanamaker Trophy and the Claret Jug.

How McIlroy managed to retain his place in the top five is anyone’s guess but at last year’s US Open, another announcement revealed that he had withdrawn the divorce petition – the family were blessedly back together – and there he was, with five holes remaining at the US Open and with a two-shot lead.

Guess who caught and passed him after he missed a three-footer on the 16th and a four-footer on the 18th at Pinehurst? DeChambeau. You could not make it up and at this point those major gods were indeed being creative in their taunts. The 10-year anniversary had been and gone, but McIlroy was not rowing in behind. “I would go through 100 Sundays like this to get my hands on another major championship,” he said.

The image of his face as he watched on TV in the recorder’s hut as DeChambeau enacted a ridiculous up-and-down from a bunker has long since entered folklore. As have the wheelspins of his courtesy car as he performed the sharpest exit without congratulating the winner or speaking to the media. There was no way back. Surely.

There was and there has been and the destination has established him as one of the greatest ever in British and Irish sport. McGinley deserves the last words with his comments on the Golf Channel on Saturday night. “I think he got hurt so badly at the 2024 US Open that he’s got a point to prove,” he said. “And when he’s got a point to prove, that’s normally when he’s at his best. I saw that today in his body language. This is vintage Rory.”

In other words, Ringo became John and Paul again. He refused to let it be. Instead, he continued to imagine.