Turning the Amen Corner: McIlroy's Major Challenge

Here we go again. There has been something evangelical about Rory McIlroy’s quest for his own, personal Grail; a Major trophy. Not so long ago at Augusta, in the heart of the Bible Belt around Amen Corner, the fleece-haired boy from Holywood was tethered to his caddy as if he was a fragile, quivering sacrificial lamb. Great groaning galleries looked down to witness the ephemeral nature of mortality, so that he might be granted an afterlife in the stars.

McIlroy has since resurrected, talking bravely and candidly about that day, and that back nine, carefully avoiding terms that spring to everyone else’s collective mind; bold, mechanical terms such as ‘meltdown’, ‘blow-out’, ‘choke’ and, to drive the theme irresponsibly home, ‘car-crash’ or ‘train-wreck’. If we, as mere spectators, cannot get over those graphic Masters images, then how can the man himself? As his name is chirpily announced on tee at the final round at Bethesda, a white noise might be fuzzing our hammers and stirrups, a bassy sound similar to the doom-laden Moog music of a Kubrick movie. As he camply struts and measures angles on the first green, we may already be betraying him with images of horseshoed putts and complete mis-reads. Even in his backswing, as stewards lift ‘quiet’ paddles, we could be exercising the psychic equivalent of a torn Velcro golf glove-strap as we visualise wildly shanked drives.

For how indelible those Augustan moments were: the way-way-wayward drive on the 10^th that Peter Alliss tried to explain away with an imagined telephone wire somewhere over the fairway; a second-shot lie made more awkward by a paint-peeled, splintered Georgian porch, and McIlroy himself put off by the whistled Dixie of a man on a rocking chair, cradling a shotgun; a series of embarrassing tiddlers on the beguilingly pretty, but ‘out of your league’ 12^th green – maddening, for every time the cameras returned, he seemed to be addressing a mirror-image of the previous putt.


Still nobody would lead him, solemn and straight-jacketed, away from the course. By this time, his demise was being underlined by the success of so many others. Ogilvy, Woods, Choi, Cabrera, Day, Scott, Schwarzel; all were seeing birdies and eagles descend in droves on their little pockets of woodland. This may have further spooked McIlroy’s remaining mental regiments, as native cries and explosive war-whoops encircled him on all sides of the battlefield. Finally, the 13^th provided a wet ball and a cathartic outpouring of tears.

And yet, by winning the US Open, McIlroy will have managed to unshackle the weight of yesteryear, exorcised the pagan demons of the past, and we can finally all chant after the preacher in a Deep-Southern drawl: ‘A-men to that’.