PR FIRM TENEO quantify the nation’s sporting passions with an annual “sports sentiment” survey, in which Rory McIlroy is reliably deemed the nation’s “most admired” golfer.
But there is a difference between admiration and love and McIlroy has never inspired the uniformity of love in Ireland you’d expect for a world class talent whose achievements have already guaranteed him a slice of legend in a global sport.
Before you start protesting: McIlroy has always had plenty of fans here, and not all of them are sportswriters. (Seriously. Here’s a global superstar with opinions and a commitment to candour who appears to enjoy doing interviews. What did we do to deserve this?)
But there has always been a current of ambivalence to McIlroy among some Irish people who otherwise express uncomplicated support to Padraig Harrington, Shane Lowry, Leona Maguire, Stephanie Meadow, Darren Clarke, or the pre-LIV edition of Graeme McDowell.
The scale of this coolness can be debated but it definitely exists – it will soon be expressed in the comments below this column. Some people will never forgive McIlroy for his withdrawal from the 2016 Olympics and refusal to rock up in Rio like he’d been dragged backwards through a Carroll’s Gift Store. He has represented Ireland twice since, of course, and twice come mightily close to adding another Olympic medal to the pile from which we derive such self-satisfaction. Plus, by playing and sometimes helping to pay for the Irish Open, he has done a lot more for our national tournament than it has done for him.
Maybe the coldness to McIlroy is a Northern thing, given our generosity of spirit is often subject to cross-border checks.
Patrick Kielty’s ascension to the hosting chair of the Late Late Show, for instance, has coincided with the programme being covered by some sections of the media like we cover the FAI, filled with anonymous backstabbing and hysterical scepticism.
Within a few weeks of Kielty’s debut, the Irish Mail on Sunday quoted an anonymous source from behind the scenes who claimed, “a pattern is emerging where there seems to be a higher quota of guests from the North than the rest of the country”, saying “it’s not going down well with staff, and judging by the declining figures, the line-up isn’t a hit with viewers either”. You weren’t reading this stuff when the Late Late was just Ryan Tubridy guffawing with Dermot Bannon ahead of this week’s tribute to The Dubliners.
Plus, we have seen this phenomenon through a sporting prism only this week, as the Irish government had barely left the funeral for Casement Park’s hopes of staging Euro 2028 when they started arguing over the will. There are now TDs from rival parties clamouring for Casement’s games to be given to Páirc Ui Chaoimh in Cork, rather than reassigned elsewhere in Northern Ireland. The GAA are wily enough to have released a statement indulging this politicking.
Some people believe McIlroy to be arrogant, but they should remember that he lives in the world of American professional golf. By their standards, he’s got all the cockiness of a yerrahing Kerry footballer. To misquote a confident man, walking through that berserk world without absorbing some level of self-assurance would be like trying to traverse Dublin without passing a pub.
Or maybe McIlroy has simply been too successful too frictionlessly on an international stage; a kind of Bono without the cringe and irredeemably expedient politics.
We like our heroes flawed and striving and put-upon and ultimately human.
Everyone has known for most of his life that McIlroy was endowed with sporting genius, which he then executed as a professional as if it was the most logical process in the world. Four majors at the age of 25 is utterly bewildering on any level but McIlroy’s elevated plane. Up there, it was normal.
But it was not normal and we’ve had a decade of experience to prove that point.
Repeated defeat and disappointment has humanised McIlroy and there has been a appreciable shift in the depth of his support across the last few years: there are a lot more people interested in Rory McIlroy now that he is losing the biggest prizes more often than he wins them. Last week’s Irish Open is the latest example: Sunday’s final round broadcast on RTÉ took a 24% audience share.
McIlroy’s striving for a fifth major has become one of the most fascinating stories across any sport, and it can be said to have somewhat redeemed professional golf at a time the sport is split and struggling to figure out exactly why its fans want to watch it.
There is no theatre quite like Rory at the moment. Few golfers are expressive as McIlroy – you can estimate his score by the height his shoulders bounce in the air – and the honesty of his frequent self-analysis gives clean, accessible context to his struggles.
Sport is more interesting when it is a mental war than it is as a physical one, and McIlroy is undoubtedly showing signs of mental struggle to close out big events. The major contagion has now leaked into the Olympics and the Irish Open, and he himself said after the former that he feels like golf’s “nearly man”. He keeps on finding a way of making a mistake at the wrong time, and is then dependably unlucky enough to find someone else in the field has capitalised.
It is harsh to write him off as a choker and, anyway, chokers in golf are still among the best-performing sportspeople on the planet. It’s damn hard to contend at a pro golf tournament at all. He is freakishly consistent and yet consistently chastened. McIlroy has great webs of scar tissue now showing to the world, and he himself keeps giving us the words with which to analyse them. It is tough to watch and yet it is totally unmissable: there are more people on board now than ever before.
If you asked every Irish sports fan to write out out their 2025 wishlist, ‘McIlroy wins another major’ would garner more number one votes than ever before.
This is because of McIlroy’s willingness to put himself out there; to roll out his dreams and fears and aspirations and vulnerabilities on manicured grass for the world to see, and then pack them all up just to unfurl them again somewhere else.
The easiest thing would be simply not to contend and be lost among the hundred-plus guys who escape scrutiny down a leaderboard. But McIlroy is willing to face heartache time after time, and it is in this essential bravery that the public have come to understand him better than they ever did when he was winning. Now we get each other.
