Winner: Rory McIlroy
Around the wider world of golf: This was another week for breaking droughts, many on different tours than the previous win. Alex Čejka got his first win since early 2015 at the Regions Tradition on the Champions Tour; Ariya Jutanugarn got her first win since mid-2018 at the Honda LPGA Thailand; Austin Smotherman got his first win since early 2018 at the Simmons Bank Open on the Korn Ferry Tour; and Garrick Higgo got his first win in two weeks at the ET's Canary Islands Championship. (Yeah, Higgo's won twice in the last three weeks but I had a theme going here. Just roll with it.) In other events, Liz Young got her first professional win in the Series at Woburn, part of the Rose Ladies Series; Bo Mi Kwak got her first KLPGA win at the Kyochon Honey Ladies Open; Yuna Nishimura got her first win since last year at the JLPGA's World Ladies Championship Salonpas Cup; In-hoe Heo won the KPGA's GS Caltex Maekyung Open after six years on the tour; and Naoyuki Kataoka got his first Japan Golf Tour win at the Japan Players Championship (thanks to IC for those last four Asian updates). And the US team won the Walker Cup 14-12.
Quail Hollow beat up on my Twofer Tuesday picks this week. I had Will Zalatoris (MC) and Joaquin Niemann (T18). But given that only one player made it to double digits, I guess that's to be expected.
- Top10s: 11 for 38 (7 Top5s, 4 other Top10)
- Winners: 0 for 18 events
It was somewhat ironic that the one player to reach -10 at Quail Hollow was Rory, given how much he's been struggling for the last year-and-a-half. Critics have suggested that maybe he's past his prime. They claimed he had lost his killer instinct, his ability to close tournaments, even his interest in the game. They blamed it on getting married and having a child, they blamed it on his caddie, they blamed it on swing changes and coaching changes, they blamed it on his somewhat philosophical approach to life, they even blamed it on age.
Yeah, poor old 32-year-old Rory, already thinking about his rocking chair at the old folks home.
Perhaps we should have put more stock in his observation that he was missing the fans more than he first realized. Perhaps all he needed was to come to a place where he's won twice -- one of which was his first win on the PGA Tour -- on Mother's Day with his wife and baby there to watch.
And oh yes, with a small but very vocal group of several hundred fans shouting encouragement for him.
In retrospect, yeah. Maybe we should have taken that observation a bit more seriously.
This post will make no attempts to sum up his performance when there are so many things that could be said. I will simply point out that in a couple of weeks the PGA Championship plans to host 10,000 fans each day at Kiawah Island... and remind you that Rory won one of his PGAs there.
Maybe we'll be looking at more McIlroy Limerick Summaries than just this one!
Some critics said Rory’s high scores
Meant something inside was no more—
‘Cept Rors proved them wrong!
He’s not sung his swan song…
But his name says it all. He needs roars.
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