‘Very average!’ Rory McIlroy can’t believe this player became a major champion

Rory McIlroy has revealed his surprise at one player going on to become a multiple major champion.

In a Q&A with journalist Kyle Porter for Normal Sport, McIlroy was asked which up-and-coming amateurs he competed against in his unpaid days he thought would go on to make it to the big time.

McIlroy threw out three names.

“Philip Francis,” he said. “He was from Scottsdale, Arizona. I finished second and third to him all of my teenage years. Like, I just could not beat this guy.

“He went to UCLA. He won the US Junior, I think. He won the US Junior Am. And I thought this kid was unbeatable.

“That’s probably the biggest one.”

Francis, it turns out, simply fell out of love with the game and instead chose a career in finance.

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Rory continued: “And then there’s maybe a few, like a Jamie Lovemark, for example, who I played on Walker Cup. And you just look at him, you’re like, this guy is like six-foot-four and absolutely ripped and swings the club perfectly. I don’t know. There’s so many intangibles in golf that some guys looked like world leaders at an early age.”

Lovemark won a couple of events on the Korn Ferry Tour – then sponsored by Web.com – and reached a career-high of 77th in the world in 2016. He still plies his trade in the PGA Tour’s second tier.

“I tell you another one,” Rory added, “is an Oliver Fisher. So Ollie Fisher and I were like the two best ams coming out of the UK and Ireland.

“He played Walker Cup, the one before I did. Got his tour card right away. And then, same thing. Sort of on and off the European Tour. He’s won a couple of European Tour events.

“But if you would have asked anyone 20 years ago, everyone would have said Ollie Fisher was probably going to go on to have a better career than I’ve had. It’s hard.”

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But the player who did make it that surprised McIlroy the most?

“The first time I played with Jordan Spieth, 2013 San Antonio. I played the first two days with him and he missed the cut.

“And I’m like, ‘What is the big deal with this kid? Very average.’ And he comes on and nearly wins the Grand Slam two years later.”

Spieth, of course, went on to win the Masters and US Open in 2015 before adding The Open two years later to move within a PGA Championship of joining golf’s most exclusive club.

Normal sport, indeed.

Alex Perry is the Associate Editor of bunkered. A journalist for more than 20 years, he has been a golf industry stalwart for the majority of his career and, in a five-year spell at ESPN, covered every sporting event you can think of. He completed his own Grand Slam at the 2023 Masters, having fallen in love with the sport at his hometown club of Okehampton and on the links of nearby Bude & North Cornwall.

Associate Editor