Rory McIlroy: A Year of Heartaches

Given the way most of the year went for Rory McIlroy, it’s a wonder that he wasn’t wearing the handcuffs instead of Scottie Scheffler on the morning of Round 1 of the 2024 PGA Championship.

It would have been fitting, no?

Yes, we’re talking lowlights and heartaches, frustration and anger, about a guy who won three times worldwide and earned $10.8 million in PGA Tour prize money in 2024.

He started the year at No. 2 in the world rankings and today he sits at No. 3. On the surface, not bad. But let’s be real, “it’s a distant third,” McIlroy told reporters.

Truth is, falling from second to third in the OWGR is barely a blip on the radar when you track McIlroy’s 2024 season. In fact, what jumps out at you first isn’t even the on-course heartache; it’s the off-course turmoil.

Go back to the start of the PGA Championship week when McIlroy delivered jolting news. He had filed for divorce from his wife of seven years, Erica Stoll. Understandably, McIlroy didn’t talk about it, but in a move that sort of encapsulates his up-and-down season, the Northern Irishman at the next major, the U.S. Open, confirmed to the press that he had withdrawn the divorce petition and was staying married.

Circle all that as bad news turns good, methinks, only other stuff away from the pursuit of birdies and sub-par rounds don’t get painted in a similar fashion.

The nauseating PGA Tour vs. LIV Golf debate, for instance. McIlroy admittedly got frustrated with the lack of peace-settlement progress in late 2023 and withdrew from his seat on the PGA Tour Policy Board. Then early in 2024 he said he was willing to rejoin the board, taking Webb Simpson’s seat.

Seemed nice and easy, only resistance was raised, and an insurmountable roadblock was put in place. McIlroy wasn’t welcomed back, with several notable players rejecting the move, and so Simpson remains on the inside, McIlroy on the outside.

The fact that McIlroy is seen as an avid facilitator to bring LIV golfers back into the PGA Tour fold makes you wonder if these sides will ever reach a deal. That in itself probably doesn’t bother a lot of PGA Tour fans. Yet it has to be a bit jarring for McIlroy, although the 35-year-old icon has remarkably gotten too used to not getting to the top of the mountain.

Being rejected in his bid to rejoin the Policy Board likely doesn’t register the level of heartache in line with both the U.S. Open and Irish Open, along with the most recent letdown, a playoff loss to Billy Horschel in the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth.

When he told reporters at Royal County Down in Northern Ireland in early September that “unfortunately, I’m getting used to it this year,” it was a side of McIlroy we’ve rarely seen since he stormed onto the world scene in 2009.

He’s seemingly been charmed from the get-go—precocious with a thick mop of black curly hair, likeable to the nth degree with a bright smile and an engaging personality. But the world was seeing a different side of McIlroy for most of ’24 and it wasn’t all that sweet—clubs thrown and clubs snapped being part of the big picture.

At his beloved Irish Open in September, a chance to win for the first time in his native Northern Ireland slipped through his fingertips. Tied late in the game by hard-charging Rasmus Hojgaard, McIloy squandered his chance to win with sloppy putting strokes late, and there was nothing he could do about the Swede’s birdie-birdie-birdie finish.

He stood afterward and told the media it was more a credit to Hojgaard’s closing brilliance to his own miscues. In other words, McIlroy didn’t think he lost the tournament, the Swede won it. Translation: This was not Pinehurst revisited.

Ah, yes, coughing up the U.S. Open three months ago still stings.

He had played so beautifully for 68 holes—rounds of 65–72–69 and a Sunday charge allowing him to overtake Bryson DeChambeau and get into a three-stroke lead.

“A great day until it wasn’t,” is how McIlroy described his bogeys at three of the final four holes, including 30-inch and four-foot putts missed at Nos. 16 and 18. When DeChambeau—the dreaded opponent from LIV Golf, no less—made a late birdie then finished par-par-par and secured his round of 71 with a gut-check up-and-down from a bunker short of the green at the 18th, a second U.S. Open win was his and McIlroy left the area with the speed of Usain Bolt.

Criticized for not sticking around to talk to the press, McIlroy shrugged. “There’s nothing that I could have said,” he responded weeks later. “You guys were the least of my worries.”

That might not sit well with some reporters, many of whom could provide a lengthy list of athletes who have stood to face the music after a gut-wrenching loss. But reporters will get over it; there’s always another story to be written.

Including this: Will McIlroy get over the painful loss at Pinehurst, the heartache of Royal County Down, and be able to smooth out the off-course issues that plagued him in 2024?

Perhaps mindful of an underlying reality that haunts him—he won four of his first 25 majors but is 0–for–38 since 2014, including a pedestrian T-22 at the Masters and a missed cut in the Open Championship in 2024—McIlroy left the heartache of the Irish Open at Royal County Down with a circled date.

“If anything, it just whets my appetite even more for Portrush next year,” he said, referring to the Open Championship in Northern Ireland.

Who knows, he just might have his world back in order by then.