NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. – Let’s do a height exercise here. Do we? It’s almost three o’clock on Saturday afternoon and here it is Rory McIlroy on the 17th, the last of Aronimink‘s show-us-what-you’ve got par-3. We are looking down on Masters champion, the only man in the world who can win the one-year Grand Slam in 2026. You can see the small button on the top of his Nike baseball cap. The shirt tail is more on the outside than on the inside.
Let’s say Rory is dead center on your watch face here. Looked at that way, Brooks KoepkaMcIlroy’s third-round playing partner is at 10 o’clock, having already aced the 18th, and for several long moments McIlroy stands alone on the 17th green, not moving, doing nothing but holding a putt and staring at the hole, seemingly lost in time and space. He had just made a bogey, a good one, all things considered. Where was he from in one (fried egg lie in a green trap) and two (bad lie in rough green edges)? It could be worse.
This is the micro view of the 4’s he made there. Micro loves golf. You can get lost in golf like you can get lost in a movie or a dream. Modern life doesn’t give you much to lose, with our electronic chains and all. There is a movie about jazz legend Chet Baker called Let’s Get Lost. Maybe you’ve seen it. In some of his concerts he played through the sunrise.
Let’s head north into the blue sky of this perfect May day, here at the edge of mainline horse country. You can see some ripples in the pond in front of the 17th green as the wind slides across its top. Two days with a wind chill and a warm wind on Saturday – perfect. The nearby stands are packed.
We go up and now the whole course is showing. It is big and bold and hilly and contains every shade of green. You can see the golfers moving through it, the golf parade of the tournament. You can see the Tudor Club with its red tiled roof, 100 years old and seemingly flown in from the English countryside. In quieter times—dusk on a balmy fall day, say—the locker room crackles as your foursome packs up and heads outside. No squeaks this week. Everything is humming. The clubhouse looks like the house in Howards End, if you know that movie.
The players, about 70 of them, are on the field. The second round leaders are on the first hole. Jon Rahm is deep in the front nine, following. somewhere else, Scottie Scheffler and Xander Schauffele and Ludvig Aberg are doing the same. Elsewhere, it’s Matti Schmid, Chris Gotterup, Maverick McNealy, doing the same. Golf thrives on this stew.
Whatever Gil Hanse and the Aronimink grounds crew did and are doing on this golf course is working. You have been coming to this course for 40 years. It has never looked better. All these exposed hilltops, all these windy golfers trying to solve the puzzles of these knobby greens. It’s hard, as it should be. This is championship golf, the entire world of golf coming together in the name of this strange pursuit that fascinates so many of us. A big one per month: April, May, June, July. It’s a short season. If you’re going to win the Grand Slam for a season, you have to stay hot for 12 weeks. Rory headlines that story, this year. It is not impossible.
If there was ever a day better than this, you can’t remember it. That’s how caught up you are by the proceedings here, here at the top of the funnel, looking at all this golf.
You launch a booster rocket and are now on top of the Goodyear Blimp. There it is Merion Golf Club and his two courses; there is the Merion Cricket Club and its grass pitch; is the campus of Lower Merion High School and somewhere in there his gym, where Kobe launched all those 2, with his NBA dreams. There’s the steps of the Art Museum (“Rocky”), the train tracks to the 30th Street Station (“Witness”), the wooden shingles atop Independence Hall (“1776”). Here we are, 250 years later.
Rory McIlroy, like other artists before him, can be difficult to predict. He made a 5 on the par-5 16th where he would have liked, and maybe half-expected, to make 4. He made a 4 on 17 where you’re a solid iron shot away from making a knock on 3. Good progress, though: 74, 67, 66. At the end of play Saturday, he was three under Alexsurney’s lead for Sshotmal and S. These records can be fragile things, as Rory McIlroy has shown us, among many others.
He’s staying at a house near the course and watching The Dark Knight, the Batman movie, at night, to pieces. The film is two and a half hours long and is aptly named. On Saturday, McIlroy rolled out of bed and soaked in all this golf sunshine, sunshine in every sense of the word. However, the chaos of the world, for part of the day, seemed distant.
“You can, you can go into a cocoon,” said Rory on Saturday, standing for a few minutes, in no rush, really, to get anywhere, in a lively mood, just like everyone else. “You do that at the Masters more than anywhere else – all week you seem to have no idea what’s going on in the rest of the world. It’s not the same here, but for us, this golf tournament is the most important thing in our lives right now. You still keep up with things: Trump’s trip to China and all that. But when you’re here on tour, I don’t mean, but when we don’t mean.” escapism, but for us, that’s it.”
To us.
of Rory in likely the players and maybe the players, some coaches, families if they’re in withdrawal. But from up there, from 30,000 feet, you can’t tell Jon Rahm from Crew Koepka, the golfer’s son, in hand this Saturday afternoon. us it’s the whole party that’s gathered here, on this great course, on this great season, on this great day. Golf gives us a break here. A break and a break.
;)
