We need to grow up - Rory McIlroy is a national treasure. Missing a couple of putts does not make him a loser

Rory McIlroy was playing the role of undertaker, tasked with burying something into the ground. As the world watched his final four holes pass like hearses, slowly and filled with dread, it quickly became clear the funeral director would end up writing his own obituary.

After the painful end to his US Open dream, McIlroy is now in danger of being remembered as a loser rather than a winner.

Of course history should be kinder but the consequence of missing two putts from four feet, of being two shots clear on 14 and one in arrears on 18, is that it has turned McIlroy into the ‘what about’ athlete of his generation.

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You know the kind. When you point out that only 20 men in golf history have won more Majors than the Ulsterman, someone answers: ‘what about the tournaments he blew?’

You highlight his remarkable consistency - 31 top tens from 62 Majors - and then you get told that first place is for winners, second for losers.

Is it, though?

This is a sport where the world’s best players face three tests.

There are the unique demands of each course. Then there is the field of 156 players. And finally you have a golfer's toughest opponent, their own personal demons.

At Pinehurst, there were two scoreboards. One told us Bryson DeChambeau had beaten Rory McIlroy; the other that Rory McIlroy had beaten himself.

Rory McIlroy reacts after finishing the 18th hole during the final round of the 124th U.S. Open
(Image: Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images)

Golf - more than any other sport - does that. It isn’t a game; more a form of torture.

“It is the cruellest of sports,” wrote the famed American golf writer, Jim Murray. “Like life, it’s unfair. It is unfaithful. It never lives up to its promises. It’s an obsession. A boulevard of broken dreams. It plays with men. And runs off with the butcher.”

And to McIlroy it has delivered the sickest of ironies, ensuring this champion of 40 professional tournaments is likelier to be remembered for what he didn’t win, rather than what he did.

Perceptions in sport can be weird. Take McIlroy. He has four Majors, Padraig Harrington three, Graeme McDowell, Darren Clarke and Shane Lowry one apiece. In addition, McIlroy has posted 12 top-three finishes in majors whereas Harrington/McDowell/Clarke/Lowry managed just 11.

Yet they are categorised differently, as fulfillers of their potential; McIlroy as an underachieving genius, a golfing Jimmy White.

Remember Jimmy?

When snooker was Britain and Ireland’s second most popular sport, White was its star attraction, born with magic in his fingers, and doubts in his head.

In 1982, after celebrating his 20th birthday midway through the tournament, White found himself in a World Championship semi-final, playing in front of a television audience of 15 million.

He was 15 frames to 14 ahead, and 59-0 up in the penultimate frame, needing to pot a red and a black to reach the final.

He missed. Alex Higgins won. White cried, the image of him drinking a pint of milk reminding everyone of his youthfulness and vulnerability.

“He’ll come back,” Higgins predicted.

White did. Six times he reached the World Championship final. Six times he lost.

His name became bywords for heartache and pain before that concept was transported across the Atlantic to Buffalo. The Bills were the NFL’s best team in 1990/91 and had a last-minute field goal to win their first Super Bowl.

Kicker Scott Norwood missed, Buffalo lost, and would go on to lose the next three Superbowls.

In sport, tragedy triggers tragedy. The Dutch footballers should have won the 1974 World Cup, messed up the final, and then became specialists in falling short, losing the 1976 Euros at the semi-final stage, then the 1978 World Cup final, each time against inferior teams.

Ireland’s rugby teams haven’t been of that calibre but their inability to move beyond the quarter-finals has become a curse where the names of players and coaches change, but the storyline doesn’t.

If fans of Rory McIlroy are wondering if there is a golfing equivalent of this kind of tale then the bad news is that there is.

A traumatised Rory McIlroy looks on TV screen as Bryson DeChambeau wins US Open

That victim’s name was Rory McIlroy.

The year was 2011, the tournament the Masters, the tale of Sunday in Pinehurst evoking memories of Augusta 13 years ago.

Again, McIlroy had a final round lead - four shots on that occasion. Again, he suffered a meltdown on the back nine.

And while his career recovered to the extent that he would win his first Major two months later, the psychological scars have never healed; the Masters remaining the one Major he has yet to win.

He has finished eighth, seventh, fifth, fifth and even runner-up in Augusta - yet that hardly matters as the legacies of golf’s greatest players, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, were built on finishing first rather than second.

For Nicklaus, 18 is a magic number; but what is almost as impressive is his consistency, the 19 times he finished second in a major, the 56 times he made top five.

McIlroy is a 21st version of Mr Consistency. In majors, he has been a four-time winner, a four-time runner-up and also a third placed finisher on four occasions, at a time when golf’s depth has never been greater.

We have seen the best of Jordan Spieth, the world’s leading player from 2015 to 2017.

Yet he has three Majors compared to McIlroy’s four, Dustin Johnson just two, the same number Jon Rahm, Collin Morikawa and Scottie Scheffler have won.

Northern Ireland's Rory McIlroy lifts the Claret Jug after winning the 2014 Open Championship at Royal Liverpool Golf Club, Hoylake

McIlroy has not just won more majors than those champion players, but has also posted 21 top ten major finishes. Morikawa has done so nine times, Scheffler 11, Justin Thomas eight.

Between them Rahm and Spieth have finished top five on 20 occasions in majors; McIlroy 21.

Yet we’re led to believe the Ulsterman is a loser, a choker, a golfing Jimmy White.

But if you want to know what losing looks like in golf then check out this stat: From 1964 to 1997, only one Irishman held the outright lead at the end of any major round - Christy O’Connor Jr in 1985.

Otherwise there was one sorry tale after the next, the 1970s passing with just one Irish player finishing top ten in a major; just five different Irishmen making it on to the final day leaderboard in the 1980s.

Remember that pitiful piece of history before you write McIlroy into it.

Let's face a truth here. It is not McIlroy who needs to grow up; it is us. Winner or loser, he is the best Ireland have ever produced.

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