Rory McIlroy and The Open that was always going to get away

Thursday. 10.05am. The wind is whipping off the Firth of Clyde, and bringing a stinging rain with it.

But this is the first day of the 152nd playing of the Open Championship, which means the first tee is full to the brim. Rory McIlroy emerges from the tunnel to rapturous applause. Indeed, only local favourite Robert MacIntyre would get a more raucous reception all day.

There’s anticipation in the precipitation. McIlroy, at this point, is level par and in with as much chance as anyone of lifting that famous Claret Jug in four days’ time.

His choke at the US Open is in the past. These people don’t care. They just want to give McIlroy the best possible send off in his bid to end a major drought in danger of stretching into an 11th year.

He rips one down the middle of Royal Troon’s par-four opener, and a Mexican wave of joy follows his ball down the fairway as the galleries as many as three deep crane necks to get just a glimpse of their hopeful champion.

It starts off just fine. An outward 38 is nothing to worry about in these conditions. The inward 40, however, is.

A 78 and a huge hand needed from the golf gods if the Northern Irishman is to avoid just his second major missed cut since the ’21 Masters.

But this is Rory McIlroy, right? Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before. This is what he does. He starts poorly, then he fires a second-round 63, then he backdoors a top-five over the weekend. Lather, rinse, repeat.

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Friday. 3:05pm. It’s warm, and it’s dry, but the wind has picked up somewhat in the past 24 hours or so.

You don’t need to be a body language expert to know McIlroy’s heart – nor his head – are in this. It’s easy to empathise. What he went through at Pinehurst would crush the strongest of spirits. To follow it up in the next major with a 78 would have others teetering over the NR button.

He almost skulks to the first tee. This time, the applause isn’t quite as enthusiastic. Granted, there are fewer people in attendance, but McIlroy’s glum demeanour is clearly emanating.

On the course, it’s not any more encouraging. If the dropped shot at the third doesn’t kill off any hopes of making the weekend, a triple-bogey eight that includes one hack in the rough that travels just two yards at the very next hole will certainly do it.

Another bogey at the par-three fifth only compounds the misery. But this dramedy’s high – low? – point comes minutes later at the par-five sixth when McIlroy, quite inexplicably, duck hooks his shortest wedge from 93 yards so far left it lands just shy of the seventh tee. How he makes bogey from there is anyone’s guess.

Thirteen over par and just one shot better than the score Tiger Woods has just posted at the other end of the golf course, McIlroy is almost certainly looking longingly at the planes taking off just a few hundred yards away from Prestwick Airport and wishing he was aboard. Destination? Unknown. And who cares? The worst place in the world to be when you’re playing like this is on a golf course. And, in McIlroy’s case, with millions of eyes watching your every move.

There were smiles on the back nine. A hole-out birdie – his first since the third hole on Thursday – from the bunker at 14 had those who stuck around long into the evening punching the Ayrshire air. In fact, he will go on to play the last 12 holes of his 15th Open in two-under-par.

It’s not even close to enough, but it’s a stark reminder that McIlroy has still, somehow, only put one Claret Jug in his pile of silverware. But that’s one more than so many of those other players we insist should have put majors on their CV.

There’s a reason the likes of Todd Hamilton, Ben Curtis and Ian Baker-Finch are on that famous trophy, and the likes of Ray Floyd, Payne Stewart and Vijay Singh are not.

This wretched, torturous, wonderful, beautiful, brilliant tournament will do that to a man.

And you can talk about the “luck of the draw” until you’re blue in the face, but it won’t matter. McIlroy doesn’t owe us anything on this grand old stage. He is one of our champions. And he always will be.

This is a blip. You might even say it is due. There is only so much one man can do. His run of 21 major top tens in the decade since he lifted the PGA Championship at Valhalla, is, you might say, Nicklaus-esque.

Unlike the US Open a few weeks ago, there are no sharp exits here, though McIlroy admits he was “22 holes into the event and thinking about where to go on vacation next week”.

Next up is the Olympic Games, where he will join Shane Lowry at Le Golf National in a bid to bring the gold medal back to Ireland. But first, he will be cheering on his good friend as he takes a two shot lead into the weekend at Troon.

“The Open Championship is his favourite tournament in the world,” McIlroy explains. “He gets more up for this than anything else. I can’t wait to watch this weekend.”

And in between, he has two days extra to prepare for his next attempt to win a certain green jacket. How long before we can start obsessing about that again?

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