OAKMONT, PENNSYLVANIA | A few minutes before his starting time of 7:40 on a clear midsummer’s morning, Rory McIlroy walked jauntily onto the 10th tee at Oakmont Country Club. Better than many of the spectators who applauded him as he arrived, he knew the measure of the task awaiting him. It was more than simply the opening tee shot of his first round in his 17th U.S. Open at what is often described as the most difficult golf course in the United States.
Five hours and 20 minutes later, McIlroy came out of the scorer’s room and walked with his head down toward the locker room, declining a USGA official’s request to talk to a gaggle of media. He looked tired and dejected.
His body language suggested he had played badly or at least scored badly. His scorecard indicated he had gone round in 74, 4-over par, which at the time he finished was eight strokes behind J.J. Spaun, the leader. To put it in match-play terms you could say Oakmont Country Club had defeated Rory McIlroy by 4 and 3, possibly 5 and 4.
On the eve of the championship John Bodenhamer, the chief championships officer at the USGA, had talked of his satisfaction that the famous Pennsylvania course would test the players’ 15 clubs – “the 14 in their bag and the one between their ears,” he said with a scarcely concealed relish. McIlroy, Justin Rose and Shane Lowry all bore testimony to Bodenhamer’s remark about the 15th club. The three men, all major champions and Ryder Cup stars, were a combined 20-over par and as they trudged off the ninth green after finishing, they looked like men returning from a very long and hard day at the quarry face.
What had gone wrong for McIlroy? Was it a continuation of the slump he has seemed to be in since winning the Masters, his fifth major title and with it the career Grand Slam, in April?
People were wondering whether his early success in winning the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am in January, the Players Championship in March and then the Masters might have caused him to take his foot off the accelerator for a while and not reapply it until just before the Ryder Cup in September.
“What’s wrong with Rory?” people were asking after a grumpy McIlroy finished tied 47th at last month’s PGA Championship at Quail Hollow in Charlotte, where he had previously won four tournaments, and then missed the cut at last week’s RBC Canadian Open due in part to a second round of 78, 8-over par.
“I think chasing a certain goal for the better part of a decade and a half, I think I’m allowed a little bit of time to relax.” – Rory McIlroy
Steve Peters, an English psychiatrist who does a lot of work in sport, talks of the “chimp syndrome,” meaning the annoying metaphorical animal that sits on the shoulder and no matter how famous and successful you are sows the seed of doubt in the mind by chattering in the ear. The challenge is to silence the chimp’s chatter. Was McIlroy not doing this?
Not surprisingly McIlroy had the answers to these questions. “I think chasing a certain goal for the better part of a decade and a half, I think I’m allowed a little bit of time to relax,” he said Tuesday, reasonably enough. “You dream about the final putt going in at the Masters but you don’t think about what comes next. Basically I’ve said no to every request that comes in. [I’ve been] trying to get home as much as possible and do the things that I enjoy. One of my goals for the year was to have more fun.”
Accordingly, he had spent family time giving Poppy, his daughter, the opportunity to see the world. He had started playing tennis again, after years of not doing so because he was afraid of injuring himself.
Earlier in the week he spoke with pride of, starting with the 2019 event, having six top-10 finishes in a row at this tournament, coming second in 2023 and again in 2024. “I’ve definitely become a much more confident U.S. Open player and I’m way more comfortable on those firm, fast setups that you saw at Pinehurst last year and LACC [Los Angeles Country Club] the year before that. Obviously the U.S. Open went from probably my least favourite major championship to my favourite because of what it asks from you and I love that challenge.”
On the face of it then, he wasn’t up to the challenge presented in the first round of the 125th U.S. Open. He started promisingly enough, nearly holing a birdie putt on the 10th, his first, sinking a 25-footer for a birdie on the 11th, followed by another birdie on the 12th. Two under after three holes was some start and he had to fight to hang on to that score for the rest of that half.
His total of 33 strokes was six strokes better than each of his playing partners. That in a practice round the week before the tournament he had gone round in 81, including birdies at his last two holes, seemed to suggest that in a competitive environment McIlroy is much more focused and engaged than in a social one.
It was clear, however, that McIlroy was doing little more than holding on in his opening round. He was too inaccurate from the tee. Golf is sometimes a game of bomb and gauge. McIlroy bombed his tee shot on the downhill 12th 360 yards, watching as the ball bounded on and on. But on the fourth, after a drive into the rough he had to do some gouging of his ball out of the 5-inch-long grass. He sank a long putt for a bogey. He dropped a stroke on the sixth and two more on the eighth. He hit seven of 14 fairways, 13 of 18 greens in regulation figures and his driving distance averaged 331 yards compared with the field’s 275 yards.
Even with three rounds remaining, assuming he makes the halfway cut which is by no means a certainty, McIlroy’s chances of winning a second U.S. Open have surely gone. Johnny Miller’s remarkable 63 on the Sunday when he won the 1973 U.S. Open here is rightly lauded as one of the greatest rounds in championship history, but there is little to suggest that this course, in its current layout, encourages low scores. It is simply too difficult. All McIlroy is playing for now is pride.