Henry Shefflin is remembered as hurling’s supreme alchemist. Custodian of the thickest highlight reel of summer magic, yet perhaps his most jaw-dropping cameo came when he opened a window to his own competitive terrors.
“I can remember the Thursday night before we played Tipperary in the 2009 All-Ireland final lying in my bed crying to my wife saying I can’t do this,” recalled The King.
It was a fascinating, searingly honest confession, a jolting eye-opener to the fragilities that dwell like debilitating mental demons in the crevices of an elite athlete’s mind.
READ MORE: Rory McIlroy's moment with wife Erica Stoll after Players Championship says it all
Like Brian Cody’s old talisman, Rory McIlroy can conjure eternal moments with stick and ball. But, burdened by one of the world’s most discussed sporting droughts, might he too wrestle with the absolute darkness that engulfed Shefflin?
Shefflin was bidding for a fourth straight All-Ireland and still he was assailed by a storm of doubt. Rory has endured 11 years without the prizes that elevate a golfing life.
There is a tendency to dissect McIlroy’s every spoken word in search of an answer to a supreme sporting puzzle.
It is the one that asks how it can possibly be 11 years – 3,877 days and counting — since a player of such superlative physical gifts accumulated the most recent of his four major titles, since a generational talent last seemed entirely complete.
In springtime, as his annual joust with Augusta looms large, Rory’s every utterance, his body language, the tiniest facial tic, all are placed under the microscope to be hyper-analysed for clues to his emotional equilibrium.
Like a brutal truth that stalks McIlroy on every fresh journey up Magnolia Lane, Augusta triggers abundant reminders that the story of an athlete’s life is often most vividly revealed by the pages never written.
Jack Nicklaus accumulated six green jackets, The Tiger has five. Rory has only mental scars and a void in the walk-in wardrobes at his Jupiter, Florida mansion.
Monday’s playoff victory at The Players Championship – the “fifth major” – has merely poured accelerant on the bonfire of speculation about whether the 35-year-old is finally poised to become just the sixth player to complete the career Grand Slam.
“Standing over that tee shot on 16 this morning is the most nervous I’ve been in a long time. So feeling like that and being able to hit the shots that I needed... it is nice to have that in recent memory for some of the tournaments coming up.”
McIlroy, March 17th, 2025.
Hugh McIlvanney famously observed a painful contrast between boxer Frank Bruno’s upbeat proclamations ahead of a heavyweight title fight with Mike Tyson and his rather less impressive ring-walk to face the Baddest Man on the Planet.
“A man whose nerve is unaffected by the sound of distant battles, may find it breaking when the guns are thunderously close,” wrote McIlvanney.
“Walking taut faced and dry-mouthed from the dressing-room... crossing himself repeatedly, like a cardinal on speed, Bruno gave the impression that the enormity of what he was undertaking was suddenly being borne in on him.”
McIlroy belongs in a different universe of ability and achievement to the plodding Bruno. Still, his understandably cloudless world view after Monday’s playoff victory stands in vivid contrast to his most striking major moment of 2024.
That came in the catastrophic closing stanzas of last year’s US Open . A day when, beneath the blinding klieg lights under which the defining hours of a major unfold, Rory could not hit the shots he needed.
“Yesterday was a tough day, probably the toughest I’ve had in my nearly 17 years as a professional golfer.”
McIlroy, June 2024 .
Rory has absorbed freakish emotional punishment.
The excruciating back nine Augusta meltdown in 2011; the first hole Portrush quadruple bogey that effectively ended his challenge at his “home” Open Championship after 15 minutes; Sundays when Patrick Reed and Cam Smith stole his thunder.
And the low point: Pinehurst last summer and the two missed short putts that gift wrapped the US Open and presented it to Bryson DeChambeau. McIlroy resembled a broken car being fed to a junkyard crusher.
“One thing I’ve realised is that you don’t create an aura or status yourself, other people do that for you.”
Rory in conversation with Paul Kimmage, Nov 2022
He was once immune to gravity.
In the summer of 2014, a swashbuckling force of nature, he seized the Claret Jug and the PGA’s Wannamaker Trophy. Nicklaus confidently predicted Rory could win “between 15 and 20 majors”
It never happened.
He led the 150th Open at St Andrews after three rounds, and Golf. com carried a poignant image of Rory on the Sunday evening after Smith had staged a brilliant Aussie ambush.
“’It’s not life or death,’ [McIlroy] said. He almost seemed to believe it... he’s answered every question. Now he crumpled into his wife’s arms... Rory buried his head in Erica’s shoulder and wept as they drove off into the night.”
How deep, you wonder are the accumulated scars?
“I think [the 2024 US Open] experience will make him stronger. I don’t think it will be a negative. I believe Rory will win a Major this year.”
Billy Foster, golf caddie, February 2025.
McIlroy has competed in 63 Majors. His winless streak stands at 38. He has a runner-up finish in each of his last three seasons and 21 major top tens over the last decade.
By the standards of mortals, Rory – with all those Fed-Ex Cups, PGA Tour wins and Ryder Cup starring rolls – has resided for the past decade in golf’s Garden of Eden.
But perspective must necessarily be a casualty when judging a generational talent. By the same unbending code that governed the professional lives of Woods and Nicklaus, where Majors are everything, the past decade has been a write off.
“I think Rory can win three or four more majors.”
Paul McGinley, May 2024.
McIlroy turns 36 in May.
Woods had won 14 of his 15 majors before his 33rd birthday. Seve Ballesteros accumulated the last of his five at 31. Just one of the last 13 majors have been claimed by a golfer 35 or over.
If the bell is not quite tolling for Rory, important mileposts are clearly disappearing into the rear view mirror.
“He gets a lot of unnecessary criticism from the general public, the golf media, the other players. Stuff like that can weigh heavily on people. I just feel like he gets a lot of s***.”
Shane Lowry, Netflix’s Full Swing, February 2025.
Conor McGregor is not the only Irish sportsman to fly controversially into Donald Trump’s embrace.
The US Commander-in-Chief has spoken about playing golf with McIlroy in recent weeks. It marked an about-turn on his 2020 statement that he would never again play with Trump.
McIlroy believes Trump can bring together the warring factions in the PGA Tour/LIV divide: “I think whenever he says something [LIV] listen and I think that’s a big thing.”
“I’ve had my heart broken a lot over the last few years when I’ve had chances on Sundays and it hasn’t quite materialised. But we all have to go through it, or at least all of us not named Tiger Woods.”
McIlroy, March 18th, 2025
Every sport has its supreme court, the tribunals of ultimate judgement, the ones where the unanswerable verdicts on greatness are issued.
In golf, it’s the four Majors every year.
In 2014, McIlroy’s trajectory was on the same dizzying course as the game’s two most stellar names.
Then he hit the hard pavements of reality
If he retired tomorrow, two things would be true: His career record would be properly celebrated as among of the very best of any Irish athlete in any sport. Ever.
And yet there would be a cruel asterisk on his CV, one lamenting a giant’s inability to get it done at the majors in his peak years.
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