Strap yourselves in. Rory McIlroy has done something that he hasn’t managed for six years. He has had a half-decent start.
He hasn’t done it how he wanted, though. Despite his best intentions, he hasn’t been trundling up the inside lane. Maybe he just doesn’t have it in him to find the route to victory that way.
So there we were, watching him on the pine needles, some 20 yards wide of the 2nd fairway, wondering what he actually meant by playing boring golf.
For his 16th crack at the Masters, he had declared that boring was the way ahead. This is the man who has become so obsessed with the elusive Green Jacket that the sheer weight of hope and expectation and outside pressure has led to a kind of psychological reboot every April. Play aggressive, play unaggressive, arrive early, arrive late, overthink it, underthink it, bring it to the boil, simmer until next year and then try a different recipe.
The latest self-help book that he has consumed — and he has quite an appetite for them — is entitled Outwitting the Devil and that tells a story in itself. McIlroy has tried every way of thinking his way to the top of the Sunday leaderboard here and his solution for the 2024 Masters was to play boring golf.
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“Good golf at Augusta feels like boring golf”, were the words he used to explain his intended method. You can imagine how that went down with the members here at Augusta National, but if they could have seen him on the pine needles on the 2nd, they wouldn’t have worried.
McIlroy had thumped his drive so wayward that it missed the right-hand fairway bunker and rolled down so long that it was closer to the 4th tee than the 2nd fairway. At that point, he was faced with a narrow corridor with a tight angle that afforded the long-shot option of threading his ball between the trees but below the canopy of their branches, thus carrying it back down the fairway slope towards the green and bringing a par-five birdie back into play.
This could never be called boring golf. It was more like Seve Ballesteros golf. It was golf that relied on inspiration and innovation.
McIlroy wanted to play tee-to-green straightforward golf that was so sensible that he would be a turn-off, yet here he was on the 2nd hole of the day and he was already box office. The shot itself certainly wasn’t boring: clean strike, kept low, through the eye of the needle, catching the camber of the fairway and giving him a short iron into the green. All very beautiful, except for the fact that he stuffed up the rest of the hole, hit his third to the back of the green and then three-putted.
Again, this was not McIlroy flat-lining. This was the game’s see-sawing superstar, always up and down when what he wanted was to be level.
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He started excellently, but missed a seven-footer for birdie on the 1st.
Then he bogeyed the 2nd, birdied the 3rd, put his drive on the 4th into the bunker, and then bogeyed that too. To be fair to his own quotes, when he declared that boring golf was his weapon of choice this year, he added that boring was “something that I’ve struggled with, because that’s not my game”.
Indeed, here is one of sport’s natural Bazballers attempting to reinvent himself, but maybe you just can’t take the roar out of the McIlroy. It’s the same guy behind the wheel and he really knows only one way to drive.
The solid start that he wanted is not the golf he has been able to deliver in recent years. Augusta National does no favours to golfers playing catch-up after the first day. In all but one of the past 18 years, the eventual champion has come from a player sitting in the top ten after the first round.
The only exception was in 2019 when Tiger Woods was placed one spot further back in 11th after 18 holes.
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Meanwhile, on Planet Rory, it doesn’t quite work like that. He hadn’t actually managed to break par in the first round at the Masters in his previous five attempts. In two of the past three years, he had missed the cut.
After this round, when he was told that he had just completed his best Augusta Thursday for a number of years, he was surprised. “That’s sort of embarrassing,” he said. He didn’t even know himself how unsteady he has been.
This time, finally, he has managed to post a decent score on day one, although still, he didn’t do it the standard way. The demonstration of how to do it that way came from his playing partner Scottie Scheffler who didn’t drop a shot all day and birdied three of the four par fives.
“It doesn’t look like six under par,” he said of Scheffler’s round, “but it is six under par. It is so efficient.”
Exactly: it was efficient. It was exactly the kind of boring golf that McIlroy had intended to play. McIlroy, however, overhit his drive on the 13th and nearly had his second on the 15th roll back into the water. That was the two back-nine par fives gone. So he picked up birdies instead on the 12th and 14th. Flighty, unpredictable, genius sprinkled with common garden howlers.
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He was left with the regret that it should have been better. He fluffed birdie chances on the 15th and 16th and then bogeyed the 17th. As he said, he “probably turned a three under into a one under”.
And that is why McIlroy probably won’t win the Masters at his 16th time of trying. He is brilliant, he is erratic, he isn’t steady and he certainly isn’t boring. But at least after day one, he is still in the chase.
