Sunday finally could be reckoning day for the red-hot Rory McIlroy as he chases an elusive green jacket.
The World No. 2 arrived in peak condition this week at Augusta National Golf Club, where he finished second at the Masters in 2022 but also missed the cut in 2023 and 2021. McIlroy already has two wins under his belt this season at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am in January and The Players Championship last month.
“It’s been a nice way to start the year with the two victories at Pebble Beach and Sawgrass,” he told reporters on Tuesday in Augusta, Ga. “Had a decent showing last time out when I played in Houston a couple weeks ago, had a good weekend … so yeah, it’s been a really good sort of lead-in to it.”
The Masters is McIlroy’s white whale. The 35-year-old Northern Irishman has fallen short of completing his career grand slam for more than a decade now, having won two PGA Championships (2012, 2014), the U.S. Open in 2011 and The Open Championship in 2014.
After his T5 at the Texas Children’s Houston Open, McIlroy took last week off to rest a sore elbow (“It’s all good,” he said Tuesday) and practiced with his coach, Michael Bannon.
When he wasn’t out playing “quite a bit of golf,” he said he has spent time binge-watching episodes of “Bridgerton” and reading the John Grisham novel “The Reckoning.”
“Yeah, I’ve gotten into ‘Bridgerton’ the last — I didn’t think I would,” McIlroy said. “I was very against watching it, but [wife] Erica convinced me. So, we’re on a bit of a ‘Bridgerton’ kick this week, yeah.”
McIlroy, who also cracked the top 10 at the Masters in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2020, finished T22 last year with four rounds in the 70s.
He’s grown accustomed to the annual April talk that “this could be his year” at Augusta.
“I understand the narrative and the noise, and there’s a lot of anticipation and buildup coming into this tournament each and every year, but I just have to keep my head down and focus on my job,” he said.
McIlroy has fallen painfully short of ending his major drought several times over the years, including runner-up finishes at the past two U.S. Opens and his second-place finish to Scottie Scheffler at the 2022 Masters.
“I think once you go through that, once you go through those heartbreaks, as I call them, or disappointments, you get to a place where you remember how it feels and you wake up the next day and you’re like, yeah, life goes on, it’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be,” he said.
“And I think that’s the — it’s going through those times, especially in recent memory, where the last few years I’ve had chances to win some of the biggest golf tournaments in the world and it hasn’t quite happened. But life moves on. You dust yourself off and you go again.”
–Field Level Media
