Oh, Rory
Golf's beloved star has been trying to win his fifth major championship for a decade. Sunday's miss at the U.S. Open was the worst of them all
Rory McIlroy looked properly gutted. Standing in the equivalent of the scoring tent after his final round at the U.S. Open, he waited to see if Bryson DeChambeau would manage to gift him a final-hole bogey that would send the tournament to a playoff.
DeChambeau didn’t, rolling in a short par putt after a spectacular splash from the bunker guarding the 18th green. As the beefy American pumped his fists, a stricken McIlroy turned and left the room. And that was it from him on the evening. McIlroy didn’t speak to the waiting press and departed Pinehurst without further comment. One report said he spun his tires on the gravel parking lot before peeling out.
It is tough to blame him for that. McIlroy missed two putts on the final three holes that were, combined, just over six feet. Make them both, and he probably wins his long-awaited fifth major. Make either, and he would have at least had the playoff against DeChambeau to try to break his decade-long drought in the majors. But, no. The first miss, on 16, is the kind that regular golfers (points to self) miss all the time. A straight pull from 30 inches, it hit the left edge of the cup and lipped out. Gah. McIlroy had made 498 straight from inside three feet, but not that one.
Two holes later, he had a putt that measured 3-foot-9 to save par on the 18th, which would have kept him in a tie for the lead and put pressure on DeChambeau, a hole behind him. But that one, which was at least a tricky putt, broke across the face of the hole and missed on the right. Did McIlroy not play enough break in the putt because he was afraid of another pull? Possibly. Anyone who has ever played the game has done similar: miss one left, miss the next one right.
And so, McIlroy’s career has turned into some kind of cruel torture. A four-time major winner before he had even hit his mid-20s, he’s won 40 tournaments worldwide, been a member of five winning Ryder Cup teams, and probably made more money than all but a few people who have come from County Down, in Northern Ireland. If his career ended today — and honestly, if I were him I might think about it after that — he would still be one of the all-time greats. (The late golf writer Dan Jenkins used to say that three major wins is the dividing line between good and great: no one gets to three by fluke.) He’s the most well-known player in the sport, non-Tiger Division, and easily the most liked, a position that only strengthened when he became the unofficial spokesman for golf traditionalists after the incursion of LIV Golf. But going a decade without a major win is still some kind of drought, especially when McIlroy has been healthy and playing well for most of that time, and the near misses are piling up. Sunday’s must have been particularly agonizing. Playing on a baked-out and ludicrously difficult Pinehurst No. 2, he did the hard part first, posting four birdies to turn a three-shot deficit at the start of play into a two-shot lead over DeChambeau. And then he started putting like, well, me. Nick Faldo said those short misses could “haunt him for the rest of his life.” To which I say: 😬
McIlroy said last year at the U.S. Open, after he couldn’t make enough putts on Sunday and ended up losing by a stroke, that he “would go through 100 Sundays like this to get my hands on another major championship.” Let us hope he didn’t mean it literally.
Bobbing around
Sergei Bobvrosky was mercifully pulled on Saturday night after giving up five goals on 16 shots as the Panthers lost Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Final.
It adds an element of intrigue to Game 5: Which Bob shows up? The one who routinely flopped in the playoffs, and who the Panthers would have given away to anyone willing to pay his salary as recently as last year, or the one who somewhat miraculously went on a heater last spring and has kept it up since?
My latest piece for theScore, published last week and ahead of Game 3, considered the resurgence of Bobrovsky and the general unpredictability of goaltending success. They are wacky, these guys.
Streaming night in Canada?
The CBC started televising Hockey Night in Canada as soon as they started televising anything, back in 1952. When Rogers swooped in to buy the entire national NHL rights package in 2013, HNIC was given a reprieve thanks to the weird deal in which Rogers owns the Saturday night broadcasts, but CBC lets them use the public airwaves for the cost of a few in-house CBC promos.
But the next NHL deal is just two seasons away, and with giant streamers getting into live sports, and Amazon’s Prime Video recently signing a tire-kicking deal for the next two years, Hockey Night in Canada could very much be on the clock. I wrote about the changing TV landscape, and what it might mean for the public broadcaster, in this feature for The Logic.