How Rory McIlroy bounced again from his US Open meltdown

Tiger Woods bided his time before attempting to soothe some of Rory McIlroy‘s pain with a text message in the aftermath of the US Open last month. He didn’t get a reply.

It had taken McIlroy two days to realise he needed a change – a new number after carding the wrong number – and that meant Woods had missed the cut.

But the Northern Irishman had his reasons, driven by an imperative to ease the noise from outside when there was already enough screaming going on within his own head.

McIlroy could laugh about all of that here in Troon yesterday, which happened to be the same day he learned of Woods’s attempt to get in touch almost a month ago. ‘Full disclosure, I changed my number two days after the US Open, so I didn’t get it until he told me about it,’ he said.

‘I was like, “Oh, thanks very much”. So I blanked Tiger Woods, which is probably not a good thing.

‘But I caught up with him earlier. It’s always nice when your hero and the guy that you had on your bedroom wall is reaching out and offering words of encouragement.’

There have been plenty of those private words in the past four weeks. Rafael Nadal and Michael Jordan were among the high-rollers to reach McIlroy’s inbox before the shutters came down and others have been more pointed and public in their assessments of such a gut-wrenching moment in his career.

Choke is a powerful and inflammatory term in sport. It isn’t one McIlroy has used himself, but regrettably it would encompass two missed putts from inside four feet in his final three holes, when he folded in on himself under the weight of a 10-year quest for his fifth major title. If it was painful to watch, then one can only imagine how torturous it was to endure as American Bryson DeChambeau snatched the trophy.

As ever with McIlroy, whose near misses in the past decade are thoroughly documented, it has become a question of how he will respond to disappointment. In the coming days at the Open Championship, we will learn if the perfect response is forthcoming and discounting that possibility in the final major of the year would be foolish.

For his part, McIlroy, 35, has been conspicuously relaxed since his arrival here. He finished fourth at the Scottish Open on Sunday, which ended his three-week break from the game after Pinehurst, and then laughed his way through a practice round with Darren Clarke yesterday.

‘I know I’m in a good spot,’ said McIlroy. ‘If I think about 2015 through 2020, that five-year stretch I seldom had a realistic chance to win a major championship. So I’d much rather have these close calls. It means I’m getting closer.’

If upbeat thinking is the staple diet of a participant in a maddening pursuit, then it would be noted that McIlroy has form for finding positive tones in the media tent.

Doubtless that is a skill honed through necessity for a man who has won multiples of everything in the game except a major since 2014, and whose attempts to crack this sport have driven him to explore all avenues, from juggling before the Masters to reading the works of Marcus Aurelius at the Ryder Cup. He has viewed stoicism as the 15th club in his bag but that grip has surely been worn thin at times.

To rebuild after Pinehurst has required a familiar examination of the soul, which started with his decision to withdraw from a PGA Tour tournament, the Travelers Championship, which took place the week after the US Open. He instead flew from his home in Florida to Manhattan and walked the High Line alone for a couple of days with his headphones in. As with the new phone number, it was about finding some ‘space’.

McIlroy returned to that scene yesterday, saying: ‘It was liberating. The thing is just to get out, to not be on a screen, to look around, trying to find the joy from the small things in life. Going there was a good reset, just in terms of seeing everyone living their lives and the hustle and the bustle.

‘Honestly, no one gave a s*** if I missed the putt at Pinehurst. It’s a nice perspective to keep. You just go and get lost in a big city like that and be one of the herd going about your day. For me, it’s a nice feeling.’

By McIlroy’s count it wasn’t long before the gloom lifted. ‘I would say maybe three or four days after, I went from being very disappointed and dejected to trying to focus on the positives to then wanting to learn from the negatives and then getting to the point where you become enthusiastic and motivated to go again.

‘It’s funny how your mindset can go from, ‘I don’t want to see a golf course for a month’ to four days later wanting to get another shot at it. When that disappointment turns to motivation, that’s when it’s time to go again.’ People in his orbit are convinced he can bounce back, even in spite of a sporting trauma which followed so closely to the domestic turbulence of a divorce and the subsequent decision to reconcile with wife Erica Stoll.

When asked about McIlroy’s Open prospects by Mail Sport last week, Europe’s Ryder Cup captain Luke Donald said: ‘Any golfer, any human being, who watched Rory finish with those missed putts, really felt for him. I certainly did.

‘Obviously I would have loved to have seen Rory pull through after not having won a major for 10 years or so, but time and time again he bounces back stronger than most. He’s had a lot of distractions in his life recently and in the last couple years, and to be able to play at that level is remarkable to me.

‘He’s one of the best players that’s ever played the game.’

When McIlroy has discussed what went wrong on that Sunday in North Carolina, he has identified the mistake of becoming distracted by DeChambeau in those final holes, which in turn hindered his own rhythm on the greens. Any criticisms of Harry Diamond, his caddie, for how it unravelled have been dismissed as woefully unfair by McIlroy and his putting coach Brad Faxon.

Answering a question from Mail Sport recently, Faxon referred to Diamond as McIlroy’s ‘special sauce’. No change on that particular horizon is understood to be forthcoming. Faxon also challenged any notion of a flaw in the golfer’s putting stroke, saying: ‘So much about this game, particularly putting, we want to know what happens.

‘Is that something that is mechanical, or is it the way your mind works? I think that’s why we love and hate this game so much — what it can do to the human mind. There was certainly nothing wrong with Rory’s stroke at all. He had made 469 of those putts of three feet and under in a row. That’s just a situation that sometimes gets the best of the best players in the world.’

No one would doubt McIlroy is among the best in the world and has been for 14 years. The fascinating question is whether long walks and new phone numbers will be the contortions that finally see him return to the very top of a major leaderboard.