COVER STORY YOUNG BLOOD:It's only a matter of time before Rory McIlroy wins a major, say the sages. But his greatest trick has been maintaining a normal life while negotiating the elite golfing circuit. He discusses competing with Tiger, the Ryder Cup showboat, and why he'll never be another journeyman, with Keith Duggan
WHAT IS THE LIMIT for Rory McIlroy and what time zone does he live in? At 21, he has been anointed by everyone, from his childhood idol Tiger Woods to David Feherty, his fellow son of Ulster turned acerbic American television golf analyst, who was noticeably gushing in his praise when McIlroy won his second ever professional tournament at Quail Hollow in May. They say that it is only a matter of time before McIlroy wins one – and then several – of golf’s Major tournaments; before he completes what appears, from the outside, an implausibly smooth journey to sporting greatness.
As it is, McIlroy exists in a kind of fantasy parallel that his peers might entertain to pass a few minutes of a dreary college lecture or a dull morning at work. Like many young men, he has a passion for Manchester United. But during the recent Wayne Rooney transfer saga, McIlroy simply contacted Rio Ferdinand on Twitter to confirm that the striker was staying. This communication occurred just after McIlroy had flown to Egypt by private jet ahead of the Open in Cairo. He visited the pyramids and cheerfully posed for some photographs, in which he swings a golf club in front of the ancient gold bricks. He will play golf in three continents between now and Christmas but pencilled into his organiser are the two nights when he will get to see Ulster play rugby in Ravenhill. He will finish up the golf year in Las Vegas, at the Tiger Woods Invitational. “Just 15 of us. Play four rounds and have some fun. It is like a Christmas party.” Then he will return home to Belfast. “It’s my favourite place in the world,” he says with the undisguised pride of a local boy.
When McIlroy won his first ever professional tournament in Dubai last year, he made two phone calls. One was to his girlfriend. The other was to the bar of Hollywood golf club to tell the bar man that the drinks were on him. He has this talent for effortlessly shedding his golf superstar skin and living the regular life. He has already gone on the record as listing his favourite Belfast night spot as The Box, a raucous and dimly lit cave where velvet trimmings and VIP ropes are nowhere to be found.
He walks about town and likes to drive cars. He has an obligatory driving mishap to his credit, but rather than the family banger, he damaged his Audi Spyder R8, one of several – “11 or 12” – prize automobiles he owns. He winces when he is telling the story. New Year’s Day. Ice. A sharp corner in the driveway of his home. “Look, I crashed at five miles an hour,” he says sheepishly. “It was into my neighbour’s hedge so he wasn’t too happy. But it didn’t take me too long to get back on the road.”
He has always been on the road. The life of any professional golfer, from the merely gifted who labour in the foothills of the world rankings to the elite group in which McIlroy now shines, is a nomadic and potentially lonely one. And the spectacular unravelling of the cast-iron web that Tiger Woods spun around himself brought an unprecedented level of scrutiny to the sheer strangeness of the golfing life. Here was the man presumed to be handling the weirdness of sporting celebrity with absolute discipline and control secretly behaving with reckless abandon.
Woods’s game has fallen out of the sky, at least temporarily, leaving other golfers, including McIlroy, to step forward. The Co Down man has finished third in three of the last six Major tournaments, and the spellbinding opening round of 63 he posted during the Open at St Andrews last July seemed like confirmation that he was the real thing in waiting. But unlike Woods, Rory McIlroy seems easy with the obligations that come with fame and wealth. In addition to being blessed with extraordinary hand-to-eye co-ordination and a slouchy, skateboarder’s athleticism, it would seem that McIlroy inherited a skill at dealing with people that his boyhood hero never really had.
“I enjoy that part of it,” he says. “You don’t want to practise so hard and . . . remain anonymous. You want to be known. And it is part of being successful. And it is fine. I just love getting home and I go out and about all the time. Okay, sometimes people come up in shops and ask for an autograph. But that is no bad thing.”
THIS IS ONa grey morning in a clubhouse outside of Ingolstadt, a Bavarian city that is the home place of two iconic creations: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's monster and the Audi car. McIlroy has spent the morning visiting the headquarters of the car plant and has test driven its new electric car. He pulls up outside the golf club in the new model, waving at the small greeting party that awaits him on the steps. Later, he poses for photographs in front of an obviously delighted audience of afternoon golfers who can't quite believe that one of the best players in the world is hanging around the first tee.
McIlroy comes across as both bashful and utterly unfazed by the swift transition he has made from childhood prodigy to golf’s newest poster boy. He has never seen a reason to change his life or to cut himself off because of golf and doesn’t see any reason why he can’t live a regular life in Belfast while challenging for the prestige prizes. “I still have the same friends I always had,” he says later on, leaning back in a leather armchair and sipping water. His hosts have lit a fire in the room and the golf club is so quiet you can hear the logs cracking.
“Been going out with Holly [Sweeney] for five years. Nothing has changed. In normal life, money is fine. But in golf especially, you can earn an awful lot of money by finishing second or third. And that can make you very complacent. ‘I can finish fifth and still earn a hundred grand’ kind of idea. It is a dangerous mentality. And that is the most difficult thing. You hear of these – it is a terrible phrase – but journeymen pros who maybe play 30 events a year and make their half a million and are very happy. And it is a great way to live and it is a great living. But I want to be better than that. But you can very easily get into that mindset that you don’t have to win to be successful. I think it is one of the only sports that is like that. But that is not the way I want my career to go.”
Even for people with no interest in golf, it was hard to escape the deafening whisper that began to follow Rory McIlroy’s startling form through his teenage years. His famous world championship win at the under 10s tournament in Florida in 2000 was novel enough to generate local attention but by the time he was 15 and on the way to winning consecutive West of Ireland and Irish Close championships, he was demonstrating dazzling talent. It was around then that McIlroy accepted that he had something different as well. “You don’t know how a 10-year-old is going to turn out,” he reasons. “But the second year I won it I beat some guys who had played Walker Cup so you start to think that you have something. But until I was 16, I felt like I was just playing golf and seeing what happened.”
From the outside, McIlroy’s childhood sounds precocious, and the easy assumption is that he was a preppy Northern kid with a family who had the time and money to ferry him to tournaments. But his mother Rosie worked night shifts in a Belfast factory, while Gerry, his father, worked two jobs. Gerry is a scratch golfer. “But mum says the golf comes from her. She did play a bit but not so much after I came along. I suppose the fact that I was an only child made it easier in terms of support and financially. Maybe if they had another kid, they wouldn’t have been able to take me to America or wherever and play all these tournaments.”
Still, their biggest achievement seems to have been to raise a child to excel at a particular gift without dulling his personality. In comparison to the vanilla characters that make up golf’s leading cast, McIlroy is an independent spirit. He provoked a low growl from Woods, his childhood idol, when he had the temerity to suggest that he wouldn’t mind playing Woods in the Ryder Cup because of the number one’s staggering dip in form. “Be careful what you wish for,” was the alleged rebuke from Woods when the pair next met. Against that, McIlroy has spoken repeatedly and passionately about his respect for Woods and even now, he can quickly fall back into the fan’s mode when talking about the older generation of golfers whose world he now shares.
“I remember playing with Tiger in Kilkenny at a practice round very clearly. And also the first time I played with Ernie [Els]. It was in Singapore. It was my second year on tour and I think must have been in nearly the top 50 in the world. But I was nervous the first day. I had spent 10 years watching these guys on television and then all of a sudden I was trying to beat them. It takes time to get used to. It is the same with the Ryder Cup: you win that and it is great and everything. But it hasn’t changed me as a person. From the outside looking in, it is this massive thing. But once you are in there, they are people and not just faces on the television.”
A year ago, he dismissed the Ryder Cup as “an exhibition”, which drew plenty of ribbing on the tour. Now, having gone through the experience at Celtic Manor, he is an ardent believer – at least to a point. He grins as he recalls the moment when it hit him that golf’s US v Europe extravaganza was bigger than he had given it credit for. Colin Montgomerie, Europe’s captain, had gathered all the players and partners together and proceeded to deliver a speech that all but drew tears of patriotism from the portraits on the walls. “I just looked at Holly and said: ‘Okay, think I better play well here. This is quite important to some people.’ ”
But he is not about to revise his original opinion. “I paid attention to it – it is a hugely hyped-up event and obviously I wanted Europe to win. [Previously] I never cared because I was never part of it,” he clarifies.
It would be wrong, however, to read that as McIlroy’s indifference to golfing culture. His co-ordinates are terrifyingly recent – he has a video tape of Woods’s 1997 Masters victory worn out – but he has a clear appreciation of the history of the game. He scolded his father for being over-familiar with Jack Nicklaus when the American great happened to see them in a shopping mall in Florida. “You don’t call him Jack,” he told Gerry. “It’s Mr Nicklaus.”
ANYONE INVOLVEDwith golf has a story about how obliging and approachable McIlroy is. Last January, with Ireland gripped in sub-zero conditions, McIlroy was deemed to be a definite absentee from the Golf Writer's night in Dublin. This was an evening when those living in the capital would have thought twice about heading into town. The motorway from Belfast was treacherous; the airport closed. McIlroy had every excuse to duck out. Instead, he took the train. You don't expect to find any of the world's top sportsmen sitting opposite you when you board the train at Newry or Portadown. But there he was.
He is a master at not fussing over himself. Maybe this is down to personal common sense; maybe it is down to where he comes from. McIlroy’s paternal grandfather worked in the Belfast shipyards. His mother’s father drove an ice-cream van. His parents grafted. Although his own professional pay cheques tend to come with plenty of zeroes, his work ethic is indisputably Ulster in hue. Without question, he belongs to a new version of Northern Ireland: more prosperous and expansive in outlook. “I missed all that stuff,” he says in vague reference to The Troubles, admitting that he still enjoys the surprise on faces when they ask where he lives and he tells them Belfast. Why should he relocate to Bel Air?
In fact, McIlroy’s way of coping with the globe-hopping carousel of the golf tour is to bring Belfast with him. So when he first played golf on the Pacific Coast, he would wait up late so he could ring his girlfriend before she headed out to Sullivan Upper School. He is an inveterate user of Twitter, constantly keeping in contact with Darren Cave, his boyhood friend who plays rugby for the Ulster team. Unlike Woods, who let nothing or no one in, McIlroy’s way seems to be to keep his life as open as possible.
It remains to be seen if that will change. On that fabled Thursday in July, when he electrified the opening day of play at St Andrew’s, he briefly felt the heat of the public gaze that Woods has lived under for all of his adult life. Only 23 other golfers had shot 63 in a Major championship and McIlroy had a four-foot putt on the 17th hole that would have pushed him into pioneering country: the first golfer in history to shoot 62 in a Major. He admitted later the thought flashed across his mind just before he took the putt and that it probably caused him to miss.
But that night, he led the Open and reflected on what had been a deceptively mild day in Fife. “The old lady had no clothes on today,” said Tom Watson of the notoriously windblown course, an observation that proved prophetic. McIlroy awoke on Friday morning to a gale and his tee-time brought him out into the worst of it. He was lured into a battle with the elements and he lost.
“I knew the forecast was that it was going to be tough and windy and all the rest. I was nine under at that stage. I saw Louis get to 12 under after two rounds. And going out there three behind starting the day and with the wind, I said: ‘Try and stay where you are.’ Being realistic, if I had told myself, ‘let’s not drop too many here’, it would have been a better way to approach it. Because it was such a difficult day, shooting level par was going to mean a very good round.”
By the time he finished, he had posted a round of 80, as shocking as his previous day’s form had been sublime. “I didn’t have much time to think about it,” he says of that evening. “I got off the course late. Did a bit of media . . . reluctantly. And then I went to bed because I had an early start and I suppose I just wanted to get back in the tournament. And I finished with two good rounds and got third. It was really tough to come back from. But I learned from it. And if I am in that position again – which I hopefully will be – I think I will handle it better.”
So it goes. Next year, he has committed himself to the European Tour, remarking that life on the American circuit can be lonely – particularly during dips in form. He is still at the stage where everything, even a nightmarish round at a Major championship can be assimilated as part of the learning curve. Certainly, he couldn’t sound more carefree on this drowsy afternoon, laughing when he is prompted by his hosts to say something about the car he has just been driving. He isn’t here out of any contractual obligation: he just likes cars, he was invited and he was – true to form – happy to oblige.
“They guys were talking to me about the technology of it and Audi were saying they are trying to make it ‘cool’ to drive electric cars. Because there is sort of an image of electric cars out there that they aren’t very cool, I suppose. But I was surprised how that A1 drove. I never got into one before but the pick up is instantaneous and there is a wee boost button in that one which gives you 70 horsepower more. Only for a few seconds, but it is good fun.”
So what is the limit for Rory McIlroy? That is one he cannot yet answer. Cheerfully, he waves off suggestions that he has a plane to catch, that he has to be jetting off again, affirming that for all his intensity about golf, he believes in life beyond the game. There is no wrapping himself in cotton wool to ward off the usual misfortunes. There is no avoiding the rough and tumble of the ordinary world. “Not at all. I played five-a-side football last week. I travel with a tennis racket. Same with cars. You gotta enjoy yourself. I want to become a great golfer but at the same time, you have to live a life.”
That small admission may well hold all you need to know about Rory McIlroy. Whether by accident of design, he has managed to avoid the joylessness and paranoia that seems to suffocate so many prodigiously talented people in all walks of life. “There have been a couple of periods since I turned professional where I have felt burnt out and wanted to put the clubs away for a while,” he admits. “But then you sort of realise you want to get back out there. It is my dream job. I don’t think I will ever get sick of it. And I feel as if I have figured out a way to play in Major championships and tough golf courses . . . I realise that I still need to improve and if I can improve those things, I am still very young. But I have gotta start winning . . . I have only won twice in the time that I have been a professional. You can be successful without winning.”
Everyone who follows Rory McIlroy believes that it is only a matter of time before he joins the ranks of Major winners. If that brings its own exquisite pressures, then he wears them lightly. He is about to board his plane when he is called back to receive a gift from his hosts. It is a tiny model car, boxed; the quaintest of toys. He beams with pleasure as he accepts it and then he saunters off to his aeroplane. A young man in a hurry but there is no rush.
Audi's silent thriller
The sound of the Audi A1 e-tron is unmistakable: silence. The other surprise for drivers is the power of the electric motor. The car accelerates from 0 to 100 km/h in 10.2 seconds and has a top speed of more than 130km/h.
The Audi e-tron concept car made its debut at the Frankfurt car fair last year. It has been designed as a compact electric car in the premium class, driving on electric power with the internal combustion engine used to recharge the battery in isolated cases. The electric motor is mounted transversely at the front of the car and sends its power to the front wheels via a single-speed transmission.
The Audi A1 e-tron can drive 50 kilometres (31.07 miles) emission free in city traffic. It can cover longer distances if the range extender (which can be turned on and off by the driver) is operational, facilitating a distance of 200 km/h.
The design is reminiscent of the new A1 series; a compact two door with a sporty chassis and specifically designed 18-inch alloy wheels and 20-spoke turbine design.
