Rory McIlroy’s phone brutality is understandable. And it also reveals

Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida – Finally, golf is not a game of birdies and bogey. This is what happened to you and how to handle it.

“I don’t think there’s a way to forget your mistake,” Rory McIlroy said on Friday at the Players’ Championship, shooting 68 people, pushing himself to the weekend. “I think I just try to visualize and focus on you think Do it, not think about things you don’t want to do or have done before. ”

“If you can make this idea a little stronger than the previous one, that’s the secret.”

Rory McIlroy was so unusual about 30 seconds after the 18th-hole serve in practice Tuesday afternoon that the SWAT was so tempting that most players were totally willing to keep them out during the week of the championship. But as the conversation around the phone search changes from blind anger to a greater reflection of McIlroy’s character, it’s clear that McIlroy’s actions are not random. They are the window into one of the most mysterious figures of golf, and the unfolding window defines his week in the biggest event on the PGA Tour.

what happened? Among the fans watching McIlroy on the 18th tee are a pair of golfers from the University of Texas. After McIlroy grabbed a car into the water on the left side of the fairway, one of the Longhorns – 20-year-old junior Luke Potter – hecked McIlroy and mentioned the 2011 master. McIlroy could have ignored the excavation, but he didn’t. He faced with Porter and his teammates, snatched his teammates’ phone number and walked away. Porter pops up from the game. (The phone call was eventually returned.)

Whether Porter is precisely the spirit of his comments is not just cruel. McIlroy’s final nine hole collapse in the 2011 Masters remains one of the most painful moments of his career, and the 14 years of torture that followed at Augusta National will only amplify the depth of his initial pain. At this point, a schedule is established every year to hope to reach its peak in Augusta and it must feel like wearing a cow suit in front of a hungry grizzly bear. Yes, the rope threads on the golf tournament have done something strange to people, but for McIlroy, he expects he won’t face the most tortured moments of his life regularly within seconds of filling the tee. Anyone who debates must seriously ask themselves whether the standard of human decency has been lowered to blame McIlroy for “expecting” better treatment.

However, in the same breath, professional exercise can be cruel. Regardless of whether the athletes will behave contemptuously should Find your own receiver. For better or worse, hatred and pain are part of those performances that pay millions of golf. For better or worse, those who try to avoid or challenge are often more affected. Bryson DeChambeau ruthlessly tortured with Brooks Koepka in the 2021 memorial match, heckling the messy people, flocking into the lampoon for a year when fans learned that he was instructing safely to remove those who yelled at him.

McIlroy knows this, which is why he tries to avoid asking about the crash on Thursday afternoon at Sawgrass. Even for players with a vulnerable history in the media, it is obvious that the fanatical story is embarrassingly stuck.

“No,” he said, when members of the press asked if the topic was kosher.

Why?

“Because I don’t miss you [ask about it]. ”

In the end, these efforts were fruitless. Rory was filled on social media when the video of the crime surfaced online. On Sawgrass’ property, fans also complained about McIlroy’s “soft” reaction. Like on Friday morning’s 18th tee, he’ll almost certainly have a weekend that longs to remind him of the phone.

“Get my phone, Rory!”

The human brain is very flexible. People live every day through unimaginable trauma and incredibly heartbreaking, but the world is also filled with stories of those who have succeeded – although in some cases, in some cases, because – These situations.

McIlroy is an example of both. From every objective measure, he is one of the most talented and successful golfers of all time, but those same gifts have caused him to have abnormal doses of heartache, such as at the 2011 Masters, the 2024 U.S. Open, or any shocking weeks in between, filled with a decade of major drought.

While McIlroy’s trauma range may be limited to stupid games, which also makes him very rich, the existence of his trauma is still very real. Fourteen years later, if his master collapses still brings him a strong sense of embarrassment and regret. His public collapse of the United States was no different last summer.

These emotions do not make him abnormal or weak – they make him Human. Just like the coping mechanism he relies on in moments of personal disaster, it is also the same (and involuntarily) of humanity. If McIlroy wants to keep these feelings away from public perceptions, it won’t be a proof of weakness or immature in a place where people who are often criticized by the public may not have to agree with them often. This only proves that he has a pulse.

But, unfortunately, the human brain can ensure that we cannot delete these feelings. We spend more time trying to suppress our favorite emotions and they become more prominent. Freud calls it “repeated compulsion,” or we unconsciously repeat painful behaviors and situations to grasp their tendencies.

This is where Tuesday’s events proved to reveal. McIlroy faces careless insults that lead him to cut him deeply and react in a way that he will surely regret. He experienced a burst of blind anger during a practice round that would not make him a bad person. But he felt that being able to react so positively to such an ancient history was not at all ancient to him.

Of course, only McIlroy can answer his emotions and life experiences – an area he has been very honest for years. If he doesn’t want to talk further about his heartbreak, it’s his right.

Nevertheless, it is not difficult to learn the results of McIlroy’s efforts to repair these wounds. We will see it in the course. Can you see the camera and hit it even with implicit knowledge of your own shortcomings, mistakes and failures? That It is a fundamental problem in golf and in many ways it is life.

The journey to the final destination cannot be measured in 30 seconds, 30 days, or 30 years. This is a lifelong challenge and work. Even for Rory McIlroy.

What happened is history. Now is the fun part.

You can contact the author at james.colgan@golf.com.