1 week Ago By Kevin Garside
AUGUSTA — That wasn’t a victory by Rory McIlroy, it was an exorcism, the demons that have haunted him for the past 14 years speared along with poor Justin Rose when the ball found the cup for the final time. Thomas Bjorn posted on X that McIlroy was always going to win it this way, with his arse on fire, trading despair and thrills at every turn.No Masters champion has ever posted four double bogeys and won.
None has ever started a round with six successive threes, none has ever made 30 threes in a week. None has thrown so many gains over the side and recovered the losses in such heart-stopping fashion. The final afternoon was universally acclaimed as the most dramatic Masters climax ever, and there have been a few of those.
A long time coming. Congratulations, Rory. #themasters pic.
twitter.com/f72nOxQbfw— The Masters (@TheMasters) April 13, 2025But more than all of that, none has ever taken us along with him to the same degree. It seemed the whole of Augusta was rooting for McIlroy, even the patriots cheering for Bryson DeChambeau at the start of the day.
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addToArray({"pos": "inread-hb-ros-inews"}); }From the outset, McIlroy has been strapped to a heroic narrative. He received his first set of clubs at two, won the Under-10 world championship in Florida aged nine, celebrated by chipping balls into washing machines on Ulster television and was a scratch golfer by 12. By the time the child prodigy turned pro at 17, he was the most talked about golfer on tour, his cherubic features suggesting a vulnerability that made connecting with the audience a slam dunk.
Sport is all about identifying the one, the next great player who might dominate the stage. And the younger the better. Wayne Rooney in football reckoned himself the best player at Everton at 15.
Boris Becker was a Wimbledon champion at 17, Tom Daley was diving for Olympic medals at 14. The ever-greater exposure forced upon them forging an emotional bond with their audience denied to the rank and file.The Augusta patrons salute their champion on the 18th green (Photo: Reuters)And being a boy genius brings its own complications.
The expectation is to win. McIlroy did not disappoint, earning his full tour card at only his third event in 2007. He won for the first time in 2009, making the cut in 24 of his 25 tournaments, including all four majors, finishing 10th at the US Open and third at the PGA.
The following year he was third at the Open and again at the PGA Championship. And at the first major of 2011, he etched his name into Masters folklore, first by building a four-shot lead and then by blowing it in a devastating collapse that came to define his relationship with this event. None was talking about the winner, Charles Schwartzel, who birdied the last four holes to fulfil his own dreams.
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addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l1"}); }The world’s gaze fell instead on the 21-year-old kid from Northern Ireland who let the world slip through his fingers. The challenge was just too big. McIlroy says now that the experience of losing so painfully taught him what it took to win.
It also set in train the emotional rollercoaster witnessed on Sunday.Two months later he was a major champion for the first time, claiming the US Open at Congressional by a record margin. Both events shared the same epic characteristic, the lows and the highs compelling in their own unmissable ways.
He would go on to add the PGA Championship (twice) and the Open in the next three years to fill the void left by the declining Tiger Woods.Grand slam winners in men’s golfRory McIlroy has become just the sixth player to complete the career Grand Slam of winning all four majors in men’s golf: The Masters, the PGA Championship, the US Open and the Open.Gene Sarazen (1935)Ben Hogan (1953)Gary Player (1965)Jack Nicklaus (1966)Tiger Woods (2000)Rory McIlroy (2025)That it would take 11 hard years and a number of near-misses to add to his major tally and join that exclusive club to win all four majors (Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus and Woods) speaks of the difficulty of winning at the highest level.
As incredibly gifted as McIlroy is, talent alone does not guarantee medals. It is not his fault that we strapped him to a romantic rocket that demanded he rewrite the records every time he teed it up, and ensured a pile-in when he came up short.McIlroy is as human as the rest of us, his emotions betrayed by body language that cuts through any language barriers.
Few were surprised when those emotions tightened his limbs at critical times on Sunday nor when he found the strength and character to hit the most incredible shots under pressure. Few will forget the approaches to 15 and 17, and again at 18 during the play-off, shots delivered when the heat was molten and almost everybody had written him off.Rory McIlroy hits it to two feet on No.
17. #themasters pic.twitter.
com/zY6tdgqZ13— The Masters (@TheMasters) April 13, 2025 The outpouring at the point of victory was the culmination of every blow he had taken since the traumatic fail in 2011, the near-miss at St Andrews in 2022 when Cameron Smith overcame a four-shot deficit to claim the Claret Jug at the home of golf, the reverse at the US Open at Pinehurst last year, where he fell to DeChambeau after surrendering a two-shot lead with five to play.All that is behind him now. McIlroy became a hall-of-famer on Sunday at Augusta, fulfilling an ambition first stoked at seven-years-old watching with his father at home in Holywood as Woods laid the foundations of his legend around the same course.
Woods has company now, a golfing great who might yet put more bullion in the major vault..
