Anyone who has played competitive golf knows this nightmare scenario:
You’ve warmed up for an hour on the range, striking nearly every ball just as you envisioned. You’re clipping pitch shots with precision and calmly rolling home putts without thought. Your confidence level couldn’t be higher.
But then you walk up to the first tee and exchange scorecards with other players in the group. As the pairing ahead wanders farther down the fairway, your heart beats a little faster. Your name is announced and everyone is looking at you. For the past hour and a half, there were no consequences. Now there are only consequences, and one bad swing can distort reality long enough to ruin your round.
Rory McIlroy has now lived this out at the Open Championship. For all the time spent talking about the tournament’s historic return to McIlroy’s native Northern Ireland and how meaningful it would be for the country’s greatest golfer to win his first major in nearly five years, it took only about 20 minutes for it all to come crashing down. A hooked driving iron off the first tee went out of bounds and he would later need to take an unplayable lie just to salvage a quadruple bogey. He couldn’t recover from such a catastrophic blow.
The pre-tournament analysis touted McIlroy for finishing within the top five in his last four Open Championship appearances and for leading the PGA Tour in strokes gained overall during a remarkably consistent season. That made him the betting favorite and a sure-fire pick to at least contend. He pushed away the massive expectations prior to the opening round, saying many times over that this edition of the Open felt like all of the others and he would treat it as such.
Despite the 8-over-par 79 he carded in the first round at Royal Portrush, McIlroy maintained his stance.
“I’m pretty truthful with you guys,” McIlroy said. “Look, I was nervous on the first tee, but not nervous because of (the event being in Northern Ireland). Nervous because it’s an Open Championship. I usually get nervous on the first tee anyway, regardless of where it is.”
McIlroy can say his poor results were purely caused by missed fairways, but the way he awkwardly meandered around Portrush looked purely like the moment had enveloped him.
Maybe we should have seen the disappointment coming, because golf has a cruel way of making home games difficult to manage.
Just two years ago at Royal Birkdale, Tommy Fleetwood arrived fresh off a top five in the U.S. Open at Erin Hills. He had grown up minutes from the course and was constantly reminded that an Englishman hadn’t captured the Open Championship since Nick Faldo in 1992 at Muirfield. Fleetwood had won in Abu Dhabi and France, reaching the top 20 in the world and raising expectations for a magical win.
He flailed to an opening 76 and never had a shot.
These are the high-profile examples of players with a terrific burden in major championships, but really it’s something that happens all the time. GGP correspondent Robert Thompson recently wrote about the Canadian Open curse that has lasted 65 years, a drought of not having a Canadian win that makes the pressure reach pre-2016 Chicago Cubs delirium. And each PGA Tour stop has a hometown hero feeling a similar burden. Abraham Ancer couldn’t break 70 during the WGC-Mexico Championship earlier this year. Jordan Spieth can’t get out of pool play at the Dell Technologies Match Play in his adopted home of Austin. Jason Day is a member at Muirfield Village, but that hasn’t helped him much at all in the Memorial.
Some will embrace it, leaning into how special of a week it is for them. Others like Rory will try to downplay it.
This week at the Barbasol Championship, Lexington, Ky., resident Josh Teater is playing with the weight of being at home. Naturally, he held a pre-tournament press conference and visited the University of Kentucky basketball arena (Teater attended Morehead State in the hills of eastern Kentucky). Like every other home player, Teater said the right things and tried to feed off the energy of the local crowd. It worked, for the first round at least. Teater shot 7-under 65 in the opening round in Nicholasville, Ky. But it’s a tough ask for four rounds of solid golf in that environment.
Why is it so difficult to play at home? Like other sports, ticket requests and other distractions like having to spend more time with media come into play. But unlike other sports, golfers have to deal with something else.
Nearly their whole career is made up of road games. The PGA Tour visits only so many places and most players will have only one real home game, if they have any at all. The professional game is such a nomadic life, a consistent barrage of hotel rooms and faceless galleries. Sleeping in your own bed and having family and friends line the outside of the ropes isn’t a typical atmosphere. Football and hockey players can’t hear the voices regardless of where they are playing. Golfers usually can, and knowing those voices belong to everyone who helped you achieve your dream of playing on this stage is quite a deafening noise.
It’s a bit confounding on the surface because a world-class player with more course knowledge should have the upper hand. But any home course knowledge is usually squashed by the mental gymnastics required to focus solely on golf.
For this reason, we should celebrate the rare moments in golf when the hometown boy comes through. Larry Mize at Augusta. Mike Weir beating Tiger in the Presidents Cup. Colin Montgomerie being the first (and only) Scot to win the Scottish Open.
Some will embrace it, leaning into how special of a week it is for them. Others like Rory will try to downplay it.
Either way, it’s far from an advantage.