FARMINGDALE, NEW YORK | Every orchestra needs a conductor, every pack needs an alpha wolf. At Bethpage Black Europe needs a leader and it has one. His name is Rory McIlroy. Though he might not always have fitted this role, he has since eased into it as smoothly as if it were a favourite jacket made of Irish tweed.
McIlroy is the leader of the team. There are no two ways about that. He knows it. We know it. The U.S. team know it and he knows they know it. “I’ve always said I’m proudest of my individual achievements in the game,” McIlroy said, “but the most memorable moments and the most fun I’ve had in my career have been at a Ryder Cup. I do think … winning another away Ryder Cup … would be one of the greatest accomplishments of my career for sure.”
McIlroy was one of the 37 Europeans who have won a Ryder Cup in the U.S. and were featured in a clever Europe team motivational video. Called “Our Time, Our Place,” it created a stir when it was launched on social media on Tuesday.
The leader of a team dispenses wisdom to debutants, talks up his team, setting the team’s tone, whether muted, modest or bravura. McIlroy is Europe’s Chirper in Chief, with a quote for every occasion and often a slightly belligerent one.
This McIlroy, so engaged in the biennial competition, so passionate about it, is far from the young man who once described it as an exhibition. “It’s not as if I didn’t feel something when I watched Ryder Cups,” McIlroy said. “I cried when America won at Brookline [in 1999]. But when I got into the team room [for the Ryder Cup] at Celtic Manor in 2010, I saw just how much it meant to everyone.
“Seve was sick [in Spain and would die the following May] and [one night] we had him on conference call in the team room. … I look around and I see the majority of the team is crying as Seve is talking to us. I’m like, ‘That’s it. That’s the embodiment of what the European Ryder Cup team is.’”
Justin Rose, the oldest man in the Europe team at 45, has a theory as to why 36-year-old McIlroy has settled into this role so well. “I think Rory is very comfortable with himself,” Rose said. “I think he has thick skin. I think that he can handle the blowback if he says something he believes but it is not taken the right way. I think he’s happy to see it and to call it how he sees it. I think he has the freedom on the golf course to just roll with that.”
“He’s gone from obviously being an incredibly good player to a great Ryder Cup player to now being … the cornerstone that Team Europe needs,” Jon Rahm said. “It’s special to have him around. He’s a heck of a superstar. He’s the best player we have in Europe and definitely the biggest presence. That’s his role right now.”
The leader may be the team’s best player and may or may not be the noisiest, the jokester, the storyteller. But he is not the heartbeat.
The heartbeat is the man around whom everyone gathers, the man whose personality is such that others are inspired by it. Spain’s Rahm is the heartbeat of this Europe team just as the late Seve Ballesteros and José María Olazábal, his countrymen, were at past Ryder Cups.
You do know that guy. We all know that guy. He’s arguably the most popular non-American on the PGA Tour.
Timothy Gay, the American author, knows about McIlroy and his family better than most having written a book titled “Rory Land” about Northern Ireland’s curly-haired charmer. At nearly 450 pages, including 12 pages of acknowledgement of its sources, “Rory Land” is the most thorough and longest ever written about McIlroy.
“McIlroy,” Gay writes “… has been for years the ruler of his own country, a fiefdom I’ve dubbed ‘Rory Land.’ Rory Land doesn’t belong to Ire-land or Eng-land or USA-land. It’s a little world unto itself.”
He describes McIlroy as a “… six-time winner of the Race to Dubai, three-time conqueror of the FedEx Cup … Every Mom’s Favorite … Ryder Cup wrangler, onetime tabloid Romeo, media darling, lightning rod … the fella with RORS embossed on his TaylorMade TP5x’s … the overexposed, overextended, way overanalyzed, profoundly human, immensely likeable superstar who supposedly spat on a billion Saudi bucks, and by his own admission, the ‘sacrificial lamb’ of the tours’ LIV Golf fiasco … you know, that guy.”
Gay is right. You do know that guy. We all know that guy. He’s arguably the most popular non-American on the PGA Tour. The world of golf rose as one and applauded him last April when he triumphed at the Masters and thus joined the five men who have won golf’s career Grand Slam.
McIlroy was lauded wherever he went at Bethpage earlier this week. “Ro-ry, Ro-ry,” spectators shouted, benefiting from the rhythmical two-syllable beat of his first name in much the same way as they shouted “Ti-ger, Ti-ger” at Woods and “Se-ve, Seve” at Ballesteros. But in a foretaste of what awaits McIlroy this weekend, his name was booed slightly when it was announced at the opening ceremony.
McIlroy, the leader, may have let slip a Europe secret earlier this month when he revealed he and his teammates had been given virtual reality headsets in practice to simulate what might be shouted at them at Bethpage. “They’ve put abuse on there for us because that’s the stuff that we’re going to have to deal with,” McIlroy said. “So it’s better to try to desensitize yourself as much as possible before you get in there.
“They said, ‘How far do you want us to go with the abuse?’ And I said, ‘Go as far as you want. … Go as close to the bone as you like.’”
Last January McIlroy said his three aims for the rest of his career were “winning the Masters, winning an Olympic medal and another away Ryder Cup.” He won a Masters title five months ago and will have to wait until 2028 for the chance to win an Olympic medal but on a brawny course that is set up for attacking play to yield birdies in New York this week he has the opportunity to achieve the third of his aims.
On Friday, McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood will face Collin Morikawa and Harris English in the opening morning’s foursomes.
McIlroy, clearly, is relishing the fray, licking his chops at the prospect, no matter whom he faces. At Whistling Straits in 2021, he cried in embarrassment at his performance after Europe had lost the Ryder Cup. Will he be crying again on Sunday?