Does grouchy Rory McIlroy even care? Suddenly, after completing the Grand Slam, he can’t score and won’t talk

OAKMONT, Pa. — What’s eating Rory?

He’s been a man on no mission since he finally got his green jacket. He’s always been chasing something, even when he sporadically held the World No. 1 ranking for a total of 122 weeks between 2012 and 2022.

Tiger’s dominance.

More majors.

Money.

Two days before the U.S. Open began at Oakmont, McIlroy was asked about his immediate plan. He replied: “I don’t have one. I have no idea. I’m sort of just taking it tournament-by-tournament at this point. Yeah, I have no idea.”

The most endearing aspect of McIlroy’s personality has always been his candor. His honesty. He reminds you of Phil Mickelson in that way. And in many ways, since Mickelson’s self-exile to LIV Golf, McIlroy has become the new Lefty: Authentic, human, and often engaging. He was all of these things on Tuesday as he explained his malaise.

“You dream about the final putt going in at the Masters, but you don’t think about what comes next,” McIlroy said.

Well, that’s simple. More golf. More shots to unseat World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler. More chances to promote the PGA Tour over its rival, LIV. More chances to win more tournaments at the height of your abilities.

Not for Rors.

“I think I’ve always been a player that struggles to play after a big event,” McIlroy said. “I always struggle to show up with motivation the next week because you’ve just accomplished something, and you want to enjoy it, and you want to sort of relish the fact that you’ve achieved a goal.”

Well, not really.

Yes, it was nine months between McIlroy’s first major win, the 2011 U.S. Open, and his next PGA Tour win, but after he won the 2012 PGA Championship, he won twice more in the next month. In 2014, he won the British Open, the WGC Bridgestone, and the PGA Championship in consecutive starts. After he won The Players in 2019, he won four more times before the end of the season.

And he never played like this. Unfocused. Uninterested. Unengaged.

He shrugs.

He’s made more than $180 million worldwide. He makes almost $50 million in endorsements and has tens of millions of dollars invested in various entities and firms. He’s the most popular golfer since Tiger and Phil, and he’s still basking in the glow of joining the Grand Slam quintet of Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, and Tiger Woods.

“I think chasing a certain goal for the better part of a decade and a half — I think I’m allowed a little bit of time to relax a little bit,” McIlroy said Tuesday. “But here at Oakmont, I certainly can’t relax.”

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He didn’t just relax. He passed out.

McIlroy made the turn of Round 2 at 8-over, eleven shots behind clubhouse leader Sam Burns and just one shot over the projected cut line. He faced missing consecutive cuts for the first time since 2012, when Carly Rae Jepsen was topping the charts. He made it one shot inside the cut line with a birdie on No. 18 and finished plus-6, nine shots behind Burns, whose incandescent 5-under score was by far the best of the day.

What’s more, and perhaps what’s more disturbing, McIlroy — who has long served as golf’s goodwill ambassador — has gone mostly mum. He wouldn’t talk to the press last year at Pinehurst after he choked away the 2024 U.S. Open. He wouldn’t speak at last month’s four disappointing rounds at the PGA Championship. And, with a smug smirk, he blew off the press here on Thursday, when he shot 4-over. Friday, having shot two strokes better, he dashed past press into the clubhouse then quickly exited from another door, hat on backward, shirt untucked.

Scheffler and Bryson DeChambeau, the other components of the new Big Three, shot 3-over Thursday and each deigned to discuss it. Scheffler spoke again Friday, when he finished seven shots off the lead, but Dechambeau fled the scene when his 10-over score made him certain to miss the cut. His mood typified the scar Oakmont left on some of the game’s biggest names.

Phil Mickelson, at 54 and out of exemptions, was well within the cut line before he double-bogeyed Nos. 15 and 17, and still had a chance on No. 18 but his birdie putt slid past. As LIV’s biggest advocate when the split between the tours was bitterest, it seems unlikely that the USGA will offer him a special exemption, and his pursuit of the title he craved most is over.

Shane Lowry took a one-stroke penalty on No. 14 when he absent-mindedly picked up his ball without marking it on the green. “I guess my mind was on other things,” he said afterward. His mind likely was elsewhere, considering he was the middle of shooting 17-over.

Mickelson was a mentor of sorts to McIlroy, and Lowry is his best friend on tour, but unlike them, Rory will play the weekend. Barely.

It has been a chilling crash.

Just a month ago, as Scheffler recovered from a hand injury, McIlroy was the best golfer on the planet. In the previous eight months, he’d won four times, including The Players Championship, the best tournament of the year, and the Masters, the most popular tournament of the year, and had finished second twice.

Most significantly, the win at Augusta National completed a career Grand Slam, making him the sixth to do so, the first in 25 years. It also ended an 11-year chase of that feat and a fifth career major championship — a chase punctuated by four second-place finishes in majors, including a heartbreaking loss in this event last year.

He played in the Zurich the week after the Masters, then plodded to a seventh-place finish at the Truist outside of Philadelphia, but the Zurich is a team event he played with Shane Lowry, and the Truist is an elevated event, with a guaranteed payday and a closed field that Scheffler declined to help fill.

McIlroy wasn’t proud of his showing at the Philadelphia Cricket Club: “I made what I feel are some uncharacteristic mistakes compared to how I’ve played the majority of the year.”

He can’t say that anymore. Mistakes have become common.

The PGA Championship was the first real tournament in which McIlroy participated in after the Masters. He made the cut on the number, shot 1-over Saturday and Sunday, and finished tied for 47th. His next time out, he went 1-over, 8-over, and missed the cut at the RBC Canadian Open.

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Friday’s 2-over result at Oakmont made it six straight over-par rounds for McIlroy. He began the round with double bogeys on Nos. 1 and 3. McIlroy pulled his tee shot off No. 1 into a bunker surrounded by six-inch rough, which is more like hay, which is where he left his bunker shot, then smothered a wedge that trickled to the back of the green, then chipped past the pin and two-putted.

Two holes later, he repeated the sequence, but down the right side of the par-4; pushed the tee shot into a bunker, left that shot in the rough, pushed that shot through the green, chipped to 12 feet, and two-putted. He settled, birdied No. 9, then made two birdies and a bogey in the back. McIlroy is the most lyrical player on tour, and his 373-yard drive and his approach on No. 18 were breathtaking, but almost none of what he showed in Round 2 was pretty.

We’ve seen something like this before. The news isn’t good.

After Hogan completed his career Grand Slam by winning the British in 1953, he won just one more tournament. Ever. Yes, he was 40, but McIlroy is 36. Hogan had come back from injuries suffered in a car accident years before, but he also won five other times in 1953, three of them majors. Like McIlroy, he was at his best, but it wasn’t until six years later that Hogan won again, and that was it.

It seems preposterous to imply that it might take six years before McIlroy wins again, or that he won’t win another major.

Is it preposterous?

Professional golf is far more competitive 72 years removed from Hogan’s career Grand Slam. Three-quarters of the way through Round 2 at Oakmont, none of the world’s top 10 players were under par or in the top 10, and three of them were below the projected cut line of 8-over, McIlroy among them.

The way he talks, acts, and walks, you wonder if making the cut will be a weekly issue for McIlroy going forward. You wonder, with his finger in so many pies and with a blossoming young family, will he ever get his mojo back?

Will he even try?

After the Masters, McIlroy, who has been living in Florida for the past 12 years, took his wife and daughter to London to see their new home there. Then they hopped across the Irish Sea for a visit to his homeland. He hasn’t exactly been digging it out of the dirt, as Hogan would say. That’s one problem.

“Just trying to find the motivation to go back out there and work as hard as I’ve been working,” McIlroy said. “I worked incredibly hard on my game from October last year all the way up until April this year. It was nice to sort of see the fruits of my labor come to fruition and have everything happen.”

A paused breath. Followed by …

“But at the same time, you have to enjoy that. You have to enjoy what you’ve just accomplished,” he said. “I certainly feel like I’m still doing that, and I will continue to do that.”

McIlroy didn’t look like he was enjoying anything at Oakmont.