Favourite working day in 2025? That’s an easy one. Liveblogging the final round of the Masters was an assignment filled with drama, intrigue and adventure, frequently polluted with absolute horror but ultimately swaddled in joy. Also, it didn’t require leaving the couch.
Strictly speaking, it was two working days (if HR are asking). It began around teatime on Sunday, April 13th, and finished sometime in the wee hours of Monday morning. And though the physical demands of the shift may sound watery enough to people who do actual work for a living, don’t imagine it wasn’t draining. This was the ultimate Rory McIlroy experience.
Watching McIlroy win the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award on Thursday night was a reminder of why that Sunday night in April was such a visceral thing to behold. It’s not just because he’d been chasing the Masters or the career Grand Slam or even just the end of his decade-long drought. It’s because he feels these successes and failures and the pursuit of them so openly.
We forget sometimes that sportspeople owe us, the watching public, nothing of themselves. You can argue that the public pay their wages and that we fund their lifestyles in millions of direct and indirect ways. You can be adamant that it’s only right they should let us some way into their world as part of the deal.
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But while that idea has plenty of ethical and moral clarity to it, the legal terms of the contract are very clear. Their job is to turn up and play. Getting the public to feel anything isn’t in the spec. Not only that, but the higher they rise on the totem pole, the onus on them to connect with the outside world on any sort of emotional level contracts to the point of disappearing.
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History is littered with sportspeople who became all the more aloof and untouchable the closer they got to the top of their game. Messi, Federer, Tiger, Tom Brady – that’s just from the past 30 years. You could admire them, you could be rooted to the spot as soon as they came on screen. But they had no interest in letting the wider world see what they were feeling.
McIlroy isn’t built that way. He took the BBC award on Thursday night and you could hear his voice catching all the way through his speech. First when he thanked his parents, then when he thanked his wife and daughter. Earlier, before he had won anything, he got choked up in an onstage interview talking about Sergio Aguiar and David Stancombe, the fathers of two young victims of the 2024 Southport stabbing attack, who had won an award on the night.
He brought them up unbidden after being asked a different question entirely. He had to blink back the tears when he mentioned them, calling them absolute heroes. They were the two least famous sportspeople in the room, just a couple of ordinary dads who ran a marathon to build a playground after an unspeakable tragedy. And here was probably the most famous sportsman in the building getting visibly emotional talking about how incredible he thinks they are.
In Ireland, we underrate who McIlroy is, out there in the world. At the Australian Open last month, they had to throw open the gates at 6.30am at Royal Melbourne because 2,000 fans had turned up early and there wasn’t going to be time to scan all their tickets before McIlroy teed off. Parents in the city let their kids take the morning off school just to get a glimpse of him. He is the only truly global Irish sporting megastar. And still he offers up pieces of himself that he doesn’t need to.
There was a lovely segment earlier this week on The Fried Egg podcast (so-called, non-golfers, because the worst lie you can get in a bunker happens when your ball nestles down in the sand, giving it the look of a fried egg with a particularly bulbous yoke). For the uninitiated, The Fried Egg is about as nerdy a golf podcast as there is. So much so that they spent the first NINE minutes of what was ostensibly a year in review show geeking out on the composition of golf balls and equipment evolution. Purely one for the golf perverts.
But they know their man too. And so Andy Johnson, TFG’s chief bottle washer, asked McIlroy a question he had meant to put to him at the winner’s press conference in April. “You talk about your work with [Bob] Rotella, trying to chase a feeling. What’s the feeling?” And McIlroy’s answer was just ... well, you can read it yourself: “It’s the feeling of that childlike joy and enthusiasm. I think back to my early days when I just wasn’t one for school. So the last couple of classes in school, I would just be thinking about getting out and going up to Hollywood Golf Club and playing until it’s dark.
“Just that joy and enthusiasm and like ... it’s almost like an adventure. Once you get out on the golf course, it’s like an adventure. You’re going around and you’re chasing this ball and you’re seeing shots and you’re so in the moment and in tune with your senses. That’s the feeling that we talk about chasing.”
For that night in April, we were chasing him as he was chasing it. And every bit of it felt vital and scary and real. Every dip and swerve, every disaster, every miracle shot, everything from the double bogey on the first to him sinking to his knees in tears at the end, all of it was McIlroy trying to win but also him not knowing how to do it without giving himself to everyone watching.
Nothing in 2025 compared to it.
