For Rory Mcilroy, now what? 4 ‘Mangled’ emotions and a bonus era

Charlotte, NC – for Rory Mcilroy, a simple question: Now what?

On Wednesday morning in front of the PGA championship in Quail Hollow, the newcomer winner of his career Grand Slam admitted that his space was moved in the weeks after his master’s victory. In a resume filled with impressive adjectives, “Grand Slam Winner” is the first and last.

“I’ve done everything I wanted to do in the game,” Mcilroy said openly. “I dreamed as a kid to become the best player in the world and win all the diplomas. I’ve done it. Everything everything beyond that, as long as I decided to play the game competitively, it’s a bonus.”

Postebles possible to read it and wonder where its motivation will find, now that he has come so far. But something Mcilroy said a few weeks ago hinted at the next stage of his career before he even achieved it.

“We talk about trying to follow a feeling in the Golf Course, ”Mcilroy said on Master on Tuesday, five days before he won his fifth great championship in Augusta National. “If you are in the Golf Course, in what way you want to feel when you are playing golf? That’s not something I just do here but I do every week I compete. If I can follow that feeling and make it important, then I hope golf will take care of myself.”

At the moment, Mcilroy was talking about his efforts to achieve himself against the weight of his wildest golf dreams. Treating a task just as massive and significant as the Slam seeks to lose in the process, not the result. Now, in PGA ChampionshipIt faces another type of task – repeating the performance without the same shares.

It may seem funny to question Mcilroy’s competitive fire. Professional golfists are competitors by definition, an elite class of people who possess an unusual mix of skills and theme. These two ingredients are spark and wood after the fire needed to survive in today’s Pro game. Profit does not remove the flames; Often you fanfare them.

But nothing about Mcilroy’s victory in Augusta National was typical. His victory, his “release” of emotion in the 18th Green, his gratitude, with the green jacket paved on his shoulders, that his dreams “came true today” – all suggested that we will always see the masters as the culmination of Rory’s career. that THERE have an effect.

If there is a tournament that can serve as an authority in the opinion of Mcilroy is Shane Lowry, a Mcilroy Confidant and a great champion itself with an experience in the balance between your achievements against the future.

“In 2019 when I won Open, I saw it hard,” he said seat in the brain. “You almost want to forget it and continue further.”

“I think there is a part of you who should enjoy what you just did and allow yourself to … I think you don’t try hard to support what you have done,” he added with a rage. “Look, I’m sure Rory won enough to restore his goals and go on, so I don’t know why I’m answering this question.”

But to hear him saying it, the next stage of Mcilroy’s Golf career – the next stage of his life, indeed – will be determined not by dreams and results, but by the relatively daily moments that precede them. From now on, his career will be described not with results but by something much less concrete: this feeling.

Perhaps, as Lowry knows first, the change will cheat on a star golf player capable of feeling even molecular shifts in his environment.

“Look, you try to put it behind you, but it’s such a big victory,” Lowry said. “I think for another time. When you have difficult days. It’s a kind is there in the back of your head you’ve achieved something great.”

But maybe, as Curtis Strange suggestedMcilroy’s mental change will give him a kind of mental freedom that removed him in his long championship drought. He hardly has been realized allafter all. (“He can be the next story really great … for Grand Slam This year,“Said Strange.) And it is also possible that Mcilroy’s transformation is already complete. Perhaps the source of his masters’ victory was less about the history of the 38R green jacket and more about the feeling he followed (though annoying) in them.

Let’s get more specific, then. What feeling IS what?

“I think the best way to describe it is that it is a combination of trust, engagement, acceptance and joy – all sorts deceived together,” Mcilroy said with a smile. “This is the easiest way to describe it.”

The next chapter of Mcilroy’s competitive life begins on Thursday morning at the Championship PGA. There is nothing left to try, but there is a feeling worth following the intersection of faith, engagement, acceptance and joy. Mcilroy uses four words to describe it, but the dictionary uses only one: pageantry

In supervision, greatness can be a list of achievements. But in practice, greatness is an action and a feeling. Greatness is the tracking that will fill Mcilroy days now that there is no empty shelf in his trophy room. Greatness can be fast if the fire goes out. But what Mcilroy took to this point is what will pass it: motivation that transcends the check or trophy.

“I continue to tell him, no matter what you do now, it doesn’t matter,” Lowry said. “I’m sure he doesn’t think so. I’m sure he is very driven to win more.”

Mcilroy is run, yes. But here is the wrong Lowry.

Profit is no longer the measure of success. Just just a result. Thus the result of mcilroy following a feeling. And he seems to enjoy that chase.