Is Rory McIlroy destined to win the Masters? This is what he saw

Pennsylvania District – Rory McIlroy set a PGA Tour record Wednesday morning. In less than two hours, he played 9 Pro-Am golf – Master Champion and three better amateurs than three. The media on this tour saw him as actually No. 9 when he was on the sixth hole. People can do it. Can be done. Walk to the ball with the club and the plan.

There are a few things about McIlroy Four. For beginners, McIlroy plays the boring Irish golf course. His team was the first to follow. These three AMS play golf. This course is a Tillinghaster course at Philadelphia Cricket Club, adorable and sensible with a distance of 7,100 yards, all stretched. Its purpose is to walk, without the toll road between green and t-shirts. (A small wooden bridge.) You stumbled upon the 8th green and entered the 9th tee as the course was routed to participate in this Truist championship. What you see throughout Scotland, green and t-shirts live side by side with harmony.

McIlroy, the sixth and newest member of the professional grand slam club, walked through the spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring spring on Wednesday morning in his familiar stretch gait. In fact, he ran 50 yards from the seventh green to the eighth sea river, looked at the hole for the first time, and said, “Wow, 3 shots long!”

Uphill, sinking into hook wind, 240 yards. He drew the towering four-iron, which was perfectly tall. Local golfers know this course very well (your journalist has played hundreds of times in the last 40 years) and have been eager to see how many of the best players in the world perform when playing. On Wednesday morning, we got the answer. Masters champions just made the course’s most demanding loopholes look easy. McIlroy did it. He makes golf look easy.

He didn’t famously make it easy to win the Masters last month, with his doubles in No. 1, and a win at 13 and winning his 17th attempt to win the green jacket on his first playoff hole on Justin Rose.

Our sister publications, Golf Magazinethere is Rory on the next cover. For this piece, I asked all kinds of people if they thought McIlroy would one day win the Masters. Don’t want – idea. There are multiple answers. One person told me that McIlroy was “destined” to win. Around the same time, I stumbled upon a stunning quote from Bob Dylan destinyanswer questions from Ed Bradley 60 minutes. Knowing that McIlroy will be in the press conference after his nine-hole Pro-Am Fun for a brief press conference, so I wrote this sentence (Green Felt Marker, heake Paper) and maybe I could get him to take out the sheets and ask him to read and respond to it. It could be a fantasy – handed to a piece of paper outside of the cultural norms of things like these – but fantasy is an important part of life. Correct?

I asked McIlroy if he always had the confidence that he would win the master one day.

“I always have hope,” McIlroy said. “I wouldn’t show up in Augusta and feel like I can’t win. I think that week, I’d go there for the championship dinner, swans in green coats. But I won’t play.

“Yes, I always have hope. I always feel like I have games. When everyone sees that in nine games on Sunday, I don’t know what the right phrase is – but the idea of ​​beating myself is a big deal for me.”

It would be interesting to hear Dylan and McIlroy compare notes about fate, fate, effort and hope. (A few years ago, I was in Mountaingate, Los Angeles, and I played with a little teaching professional (Suzy) who was middle-aged and over the years, and she said she was a golf coach for Bob Dylan and I had every reason to believe her.

“It’s a feeling that you know what you know about yourself. It will come true. This is a thing you have to keep yourself. Because it’s a feeling of fragility. If you put it there, someone will kill it. It’s better to put everything in it. ”

These are amazing sentences. However, these problems are certainly not all of a certain degree. McIlroy said he imagined winning the shots the master needed. He didn’t imagine the butler ceremony or any of them.

“The worst thing I felt was that on Augusta Sunday, maybe I pushed the birdie putt to 10 because I was like, ‘Oh, me, I real Now you can’t mess it up. ‘”

It was a high pressure cooker that Sunday afternoon. That’s what makes it so wonderful and exciting. Justin Thomas said Wednesday that he watched the finale and “stick to TV.” Xander Schauffele is almost the same.

This week, Philadelphia Cricket’s trust won’t be like that. The rich will get richer this week, and CBS audiences will see a lovely old classic course manipulated by modern equipment and fierce speed. The winner will receive a silver cricket ball and $3.6 million. You can guess Dylan will tell 72 players during this event:

appear That. McIlroy played some cricket in Northern Ireland as a kid. He played a lot of golf in these old-fashioned classes. He doesn’t have to defeat his own mind to win here. All he had to do was score lower than the other 71 people.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments via michael.bamberger@golf.com