When Rory McIlroy won Masters Last April, fell to his knees and began to cry, you can feel the grandeur of the moment. McIlroy had waited a lifetime for thisto win the tournament he had been hinting at for years.
He held a four-shot lead after 54 holes in 2011, but exploded on Sunday, shooting 80 and tying for 15th. He had seven top 10s since then, but never a win, not until last year, when McIlroy edged Justin Rose in a playoff for earn the green jacket and complete the career Grand Slam.
And with winning the Masters, you get a pre-Masters press conference, as McIlroy did virtually Wednesday with a handful of reporters. One of the questions he was asked was what he learned how to do win Masters from winning The masters.
His response? The importance of staying aggressive. And he even gave him an assist Phil Mickelson.
McIlroy said he played a practice round with Mickelson, a three-time Masters champion, about 15 years ago and Mickelson told him, “Rory, one of the reasons I love Augusta National because I feel like I can be so aggressive here.”
“I remember thinking, ‘What does he mean?'” McIlroy said. “I feel the opposite. I feel like I can’t be aggressive here because there’s too many bad places to miss. But Phil had so much — still has, maybe — confidence in his short game that if he misses an approach shot by being aggressive, he still feels he can get the ball up and down. I’d say becoming a better player and maybe working on my short game, maybe it allowed me to get a little bit greener and greener, got greener and better with me getting closer to the game at Augusta.”
McIlroy said that over the years, the demands of Augusta National have made his approach play more, and that’s when you leave yourself in bad spots. But when he learned to start playing more aggressively, it paid off.
He can even look back at his last round last year and find examples. He racked up birdies while being aggressive on the front nine, but once he got the lead and reached the back nine, he changed his game.
“The first time my mindset or my tactics went a little bit defensive, like trying to protect the lead, that’s when I got into trouble,” McIlroy said. “Obviously what happened on 13 (double bogey) and 14 (bogey), and when I got to 15, again, I had to be aggressive. I had to make birdie again and I was able to make it. So maybe there’s a lesson in there somewhere to not take your foot off the gas. I thought I was trying to do a smart thing by playing three times. Protecting the lead that I built, but in hindsight, everything that went good for me that day and that week was when I played aggressively, when I went for my shots.
