Just how good can McIlroy be?
Rory McIlroy has swept pretty much all before him this year. Still only 25 years of age, the young Northern Irishman has the potential to be one of the golfing world’s all-time greats.
The problem is – the same could have been said of many other youngsters before him. Golf history is littered with players who have dominated for short periods only to fade away. Even golfers who have stayed around the top flight for many years after their particularly bright year or two still haven’t quite managed to maintain their absolute brilliance. Golfers from history such as Tony Jacklin CBE and Johnny Miller, great players though they undoubtedly were, spring immediately to mind.
On the other hand, the absolute greatest golfers from history are able to replicate that brilliance for longer periods. In this category belong the greatest gofers of all time such as Jack Nicklaus, surely the greatest golfer ever, along with Tiger Woods, Harry Vardon, Walter Hagen, Bobby Jones, Sam Snead, Gary Player, Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer, Tom Watson and arguably the late, great Seve Ballesteros.
So which side of this particular line Rory McIlroy will end up on remains to be seen. But he’s already proved himself to be one of the greatest British golfers of all time. With four majors already to his name, two of which (the Open championship and his second PGA Championship win) came in the last year alone, McIlroy currently stands head and shoulders above all other golfers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Ranked world number one in the official world golf rankings by quite a distance as things stand, McIlroy is already a short-priced 9/2 favorite with Betfair to win next year’s Master’s Golf tournament at Augusta – the only major he still needs to complete the Grand Slam of golf.
The Masters is seen by many golfing pundits as the ultimate test in golf. All the top players know the course inside out and it’s a true test of target golf at the highest level – usually played in near-perfect conditions. In other words, lady luck doesn’t usually have too much of a role to play here. If you can win the Masters you can win any of the other major championships. So this one really would be the icing on the cake for McIlroy whose best showing in the tournament so far came this year, when he tied for eighth place. So by his own exacting standards – he’s got absolutely nowhere at Augusta so far.
If he can win a Masters, though, then this would put McIlroy in a very exclusive club indeed. During the modern era of golf, only a veritable handful of players have achieved career grand slams. And there are some pretty big names on this particular shortlist – namely Ben Hogan, Gene Sarazen, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, and most recently, Tiger Woods.
Incidentally, no golfer has ever achieved a modern grand slam of golf in one season. Tiger Woods came impressively close, though, when he won the four Majors consecutively, but this took place over two calendar years in 2000 and 2001; an unbelievable achievement in this day and age.
And two of these Grand Slam-achieving players also happen to top the all-time record list in terms of total numbers of Major championships won. The Golden Bear managed to win an amazing 18 Majors (and arguably had an even more incredible 19 runners-up places to his credit) whilst Tiger Woods has currently won 14 Majors.
Woods will still hope to win more Majors and is usually amongst the favorites for each tournament he’s in – but he hasn’t won one since back in 2008 when he won the US Open. This, of course, came before his highly publicized off-course martial troubles and his injuries. Also, at almost 39 years of age, Woods certainly isn’t getting any younger.
McIlroy has already equaled two of these players’ places in the record books. There have only ever been two other players in the whole history of golf to win three Majors by the time they were 25 – and these were Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus. So he’s in a very exclusive club already.
At just 25, then, McIlroy can most certainly win more Major Championships yet. And the one he’ll undoubtedly want more than any other will be the Masters. And if he can possibly win at Augusta next spring – this will unequivocally make him one of the top few players of all time. But that’s a big “if”!
At the Open Championship last July at Hoylake on the Wirral, though, the young Northern Irishman certainly proved he’s a real scrapper. Although he’d been well clear of the chasing pack, McIlroy shot back-to-back bogeys and the field, led by Californian Rickie Fowler and Spaniard Sergio Garcia, both got within two strokes of McIlroy on the back nine. But the Northern Irishman held his nerve and then increased his lead once more. He wound up with a two-stroke win, but even that belied the true easy nature of his overall victory.
McIlroy has done a huge amount to raise his popularity with golfing fans all over the world – and he would be a very popular addition to the all-time greats list on both sides of the big pond. Whether he’ll get there is quite another matter of course, but he has a better chance than any other living golfer of joining Tiger Woods and co. in the exclusive club.
The most important thing he can do, though, is not to even think about all this stuff. The true greats at all sports have one big thing in common – they absolutely love the sport they play. They’re doing it for the love of the game rather than trying to break any records – they’re just a bonus.
So it will be all eyes on Augusta for the 2015 Masters next spring from April 9th to 12th for the big test. But there’s a lot of golf to be played around the world before then!