Twenty minutes after Bryson DeChambeau‘s tremendous and definitive bunker shot, the parking space reserved for Rory McIlroy at Pinehurst as the 2011 US Open champion was empty. The trophy presentation ceremony had not yet begun and there was no trace of the Northern Irishman or anyone from his team on the gigantic North Carolina property. Moreover, according to an app that monitors the flights of private planes in the United States, Rory’s jet was already in the air when Bryson was still attending to the media after his victory.
McIlroy left Pinehurst like a soul possessed. He anxiously watched DeChambeau’s shot and putt without leaving the scorecard delivery room, with his cap askew, half his polo shirt hanging out and his mind racing a thousand miles an hour. He couldn’t believe his mistakes on the 16th and 18th greens. He was looking at the television, but he wasn’t really seeing. He couldn’t concentrate. Not a gesture. Lost look. He was in shock. As if he had seen a ghost. As if he had missed two 70-centimetre putts to win a US Open.
McIlroy said his French goodbye to Pinehurst, surrounded by his closest circle and without exchanging a word with anyone. He also didn’t speak to the media. A good handful of journalists were waiting in the interview area in front of the locker room, but they didn’t get his comments. You have to be made of stone not to put yourself in his shoes and understand the situation. We would all have liked to hear his feelings, obviously devastating, but you have to have the minimum empathy to understand that it was not easy to expose himself publicly after what had happened.
McIlroy is not exactly a golfer suspected of shirking responsibility, quite the opposite. He usually faces up, answers everything he is asked, sometimes even too much, and even in his lowest moments he has given explanations. His extensive appearance before the media in Augusta after losing a large lead in the last nine holes on Sunday in 2011 is remembered.
Nor is it the first time that McIlroy has left a golf course without speaking to the journalists, and it certainly won’t be the last. Rory has had very tough moments in his career, he has let Majors slip away in the last holes, he has lost tournaments he had won (not least this year at the Dubai Invitational, before sending his tee shot into the water on the 18th hole), but this has undoubtedly been the hardest defeat of his life, because of how it happened and the context, with ten years behind him without winning.
