Behind the genial facade, Rory McIlroy is difficult as nails

Rory McIlroy seemed chirpy on the driving range on Tuesday. It was a little after 1pm here in Louisville and there were smiles and laughs with his entourage of three as the whispers gathered pace in the grandstand behind them.

By then, word had got out, as he well knew, and it was rapidly gaining traction on a private story that might yet have a bearing on his 10-year mission to reestablish himself as a golfer who wins titles on his sport’s major stages.

The latter was very much the only narrative in his name on Monday, when McIlroy was still at home in Florida and most of the circus had arrived in town for the US PGA Championship. Could he end the decade-long wait? Would this course, Valhalla, where a younger, more fearless version of himself won his fourth and most recent major in 2014, also be the place where he stopped the clock and all those many questions that have accompanied it.

By early afternoon on Tuesday, so after it came to light that McIlroy had filed papers on Monday with a Florida court for divorce from his wife of seven years, Erica Stoll, there were different questions. Not the least of which concerned whether he would be able to withstand the parading of personal traumas in such a public setting when his professional stakes are already so high.

We will learn that over the coming days, which will stand as a form of sporting voyeurism and one of those strange cases where we inevitably blur the lines between what an athlete does and how an athlete lives.

In most sports, this would barely ripple. But in the mistaken belief that golf is more stately than our other games, and in a week when most of the discourse has been on the sawdust dry topic of tour mergers, this has become the biggest talking point. By Tuesday evening, it was being discussed around the world.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of that, whatever other details or innuendos creep out in time, it is noise. It is an added context. It will mean questions from media when we meet with McIlroy at 1pm locally on Wednesday, and it will be chatter in the galleries that amass alongside him from Thursday onwards.

That will be tough to block out – even if he can’t hear much of it, he will know it’s there, just as he did on the driving range. That will make a hard task even harder. But here’s the thing with McIlroy: he’s a harder man than meets the eye, which goes for anyone for excels in elite sport. For McIlroy, the world No 2, the hardness is often lost beneath his geniality, but it is there all the same.

Of all places, this is where he exhibited it so clearly 10 years ago. Those steps have been retraced comprehensively in the past week of build-up to this tournament, but one of the details that has been a little overlooked in the bigger picture of a thrilling win concerned an incident on the 18th tee.

Darkness was falling by then and it was very much in doubt whether McIlroy and his playing partner, Bernd Wiesberger, would finish their round. One of the key details is that the pairing in front included Phil Mickelson, who in all eyes would rank as the second biggest alpha of his sport. In his own, he might well have disputed Tiger Woods’ place as No 1. He is that kind of guy – the sort who will always believe he is the smartest in any given room or field.

The second detail is that in golf, psychology matters more than most athletic pursuits. Those seconds when you stand over a ball, or walk after a bad one, can swallow you whole if you have to think too much. And so Mickelson, two shots behind McIlroy stepping onto the 18th tee, a scoreable par five, knew a leisurely walk up the last and a birdie could mean McIlroy running out of light and having to sleep on a one-shot lead.

But McIlroy, then just 25 and riding the form and confidence of a sporting comet, gripped the situation in a way that was deeply controversial.

He sought the permission of officials to tee off immediately after Mickelson and Rickie Fowler, and in unprecedented scenes it was granted, meaning that pair had to hit from the tee and then wait next to the fairway for McIlroy to play. That caused Mickelson great irritation because it cost him an advantage he was perfectly entitled to. Speaking in his commentary, Sir Nick Faldo noted how unusual it was.

McIlroy and Wiesberger were now effectively cleared to play the last hole as a foursome. When Mickelson collected his birdie, McIlroy had just enough time to finish with a par and won the tournament – his second major in the space of three weeks, having also stormed The Open. He spoke at the time about the merits of winning ugly, but he commented more recently about the steel involved in those tee-box discussions.

‘I’m not a huge fan of conflict, but when push comes to shove, I will,’ McIlroy said, reflecting on the exchanges.

‘That was one of those times when I needed to sort of assert my will on a situation. I think if I wasn’t as pushy as I was, I would have had to sleep on that lead and on that tee shot overnight, I just didn’t want to do that.

‘I think the guys up ahead were pretty unhappy with how it all unfolded. I got the result that I was looking for in the end and that’s all that matters.’

So that’s hardness. It might also be a malpractice in the realms of pseudo-psychology if we conflate it with his current situation, which will vastly outweigh any sporting scenario, especially because there is a three-year-old daughter at the heart of the upheaval. But that episode with Mickelson was a glimpse of the dog he puts into a fight.

The same goes for him cupping his ear and screaming ‘I can’t hear you’ at a hostile crowd during the 2016 Ryder Cup at Hazeltine during his singles match with Patrick Reed (McIlroy lost that one) and again when he refused to acknowledge the American in what became known as tee-gate at the 2023 Dubai Desert Classic (he won in a final-round showdown). Most visibly, we saw that dog when he had to be pulled away from Patrick Cantlay’s caddie in a carpark at the 2023 Ryder Cup.

That appetite for a fight has arguably been clearest and loudest in the LIV skirmishes, first in how he appointed himself the start-up’s chief critic, and then with how he has gone up against the likes of Woods, Jordan Spieth and Patrick Cantlay in saying the PGA Tour should stop fighting against the Saudi invasion of their traditional space and consolidate. Agree with him or not, he knows how to go against the grain. He has been willing to make himself a lightning rod for criticism in a debate that for two years has been the most heated his sport has known.

What has been so conspicuous is that within such a furnace, McIlroy has also played some of the very best golf of his career, even if his success has not translated into a major win. That he has won eight titles worldwide during the political frenzy of the 2022, 2023 and 2024 seasons would indicate, quite emphatically, how his game can rise in tandem with the distractions around him.

These latest headlines pertain to a vastly different situation, naturally. And again, searching for links between how he handles sporting dramas and private turmoil is the kind of undertaking that could be exploded into 1,000 pieces of nonsense with one missed cut. But if we do have contemporary evidence for how he might fare this week, it could be found in the Sunday just gone.

In the estimation of many qualified observers, his five-stroke win in the Wells Fargo Championship, his second in two starts, was the closest he has resembled the breakthrough act that once took his sport by storm. His driving was imperious, his wedges were sharp, and he killed off Xander Schauffele in the way he did years ago.

He was wearing a wedding ring at Quail Hollow – by Tuesday at Valhalla that was gone – but his personal turbulence would have already been in full swing by the time he gave his victory press conference.

In it, he was asked how he was able to perform so comprehensively when his political skirmishes were still ongoing (days earlier he had confirmed he was vetoed by Woods, Spieth and Cantlay in one of his manoeuvres to rejoin the negotiations with the Saudis). He responded: ‘I’ve always been able to compartmentalise pretty well. For whatever reason I seem to play very good golf whenever I have a lot of stuff going on.’

The collapse of his marriage, and the noise it will bring, sits in a different category to all that. But the comments have retrospectively invoked other thoughts from 2014, when his high-profile relationship with Caroline Wozniacki ended at his instigation in the May and three months later he had won two majors and a ruck with Mickelson.

Utterly irrelevant compared to what he is now dealing with? Quite possibly. But it would also be foolish to doubt he has the hardness needed to finally end that 10-year drought when the noise of a thousand whispers picks up in the coming days.