Rory McIlroy’s withdrawal from Tuesday’s scheduled media conference at Hoylake was arguably more interesting than anything he might have said.
The less is more approach first unveiled at the US Open a month ago is a fascinating part of the new dynamic as golf shakes down following the Saudi coup.
In the old days pre-June, when the PGA Tour imagined it ruled the world and sent out McIlroy to speak for it, he would have breezed into Hoylake and held forth on the state of his game.
There would have been questions about the significance of Sunday’s Scottish Open victory, how he celebrated the win, what it felt like to be back at Royal Liverpool, where he won the Open Championship nine years ago, what he had for breakfast, and so on.
McIlroy arrived in the early afternoon and went straight to the range, stopping only to speak to Sky Sports reporter Di Stewart. Apparently, he allowed himself a glass of red on Sunday evening and was looking forward to reconnecting with The Open vibe at Hoylake.
All of this coincided with the return to his post of PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, who had been absent with an unspecified health condition since his monumental volte-face regarding the Saudi golf incursion. Once the sworn enemy of LIV Golf, Monahan announced a controversial peace deal that stunned his membership and knocked the wind out of McIlroy. It also alienated some of the biggest names on tour, including Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas, both of whom were equivocal on the desirability of Monahan continuing in his post.
McIlroy’s retreat from the frontline to focus less on politics and more on golf has already born fruit with that dramatic one-stroke victory at the Renaissance Club. McIlroy had become a victim of his immense likability and popularity. Those four major wins by the age of 25 cast him as a superstar of the post-Tiger era, a role he was happy to embrace.
He never associated the barren major years since 2014 with the burden of the poster-boy role. Victories at the Players and the FedEx Cup among others kept his profile sky high. The win in Scotland was his 24th on the PGA Tour, an immense return bettered only by Woods and Phil Mickelson of the current generation.
But the longer the hiatus between major wins has stretched the more it has become a talking point, particularly at the Masters, the only major he has yet to win. McIlroy would speak out of a sense of duty to the game. He understood his representative role, even though the responsibility of doing so increasingly became was a tax on performance.
That was then. The obvious sense of betrayal he felt at the turn of events engineered by Monahan, not only the outcome but the secrecy of negotiations to which he was once central, have forced a recalibration that might be the key to breaking the major dam. Silence could be his friend this week, allowing him to control to a degree the mania which is ever present at this event whether he speaks to the media or not.
He set out after his ball at the first followed by a cohort of reporters and photographers whilst others strolled about the precinct alone. McIlroy knows the drill. It has been this way since he broke through as a cherubic 17-year-old earning his Tour card at the Dunhill Masters.
He revealed a steely focus on Sunday, recovering with closing birdies at the last two holes after letting his overnight lead slip. His reticence here might just be a manifestation of the same impulse, a harder edge leading to improved outcomes.
