'It slaps you in the face': Rory McIlroy says Murray suicide brought perspective
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The sliver-haired man in a one-size-too-big navy fleece slipped under the ropes at the eighth green and made a beeline for Rory McIlroy, striding in for a hug and holding it for what looked a half second too long for McIlroy’s liking.
Jay Monahan is on site and very much in sight at the RBC Canadian Open this week. The PGA Tour Commissioner and his brightest light spent 10 minutes in deep conversation as McIlroy was still wrapping up nine holes of pro-am duties in early Wednesday sunshine at Hamilton Golf and Country Club.
To be fair, McIlroy didn’t miss much as he hung back. His four pro-am partners had spent enough of the morning skulling drives and clumping irons, a borderline preposterous 6.30am tee time catching the mere mortals on the drowsy side as balls dribbled off course and into dewy corners. Anyway, McIlroy and Monahan had plenty to chew on.
Golf’s civil war remains intractable. Monahan’s position atop the Tour remains unsteady at best. For successive years the Canadian Open has had the misfortune of coinciding with the tectonic shifts which first split the sport into this side and the Saudi side and then brought them crashing back into one another. The Tuesday of last year’s edition was the scene of Monahan’s infamous all-player meeting in Toronto where he tried to explain the shock merger between the PGA and LIV.
A year later, there’s been precious little progress and things are mostly just festering, with McIlroy gradually pulling back from his frontline position. Here he reiterated that “in hindsight I wish I hadn't have gotten as deeply involved”. Yet there were perhaps other reasons why the Holywood man looked the less animated of the pair as he and Monahan walked and talked. Away from the course, McIlroy has other things to chew on.
His private life is currently very public, fodder for North America’s tabloids after news of McIlroy's divorce from Erica Stoll, his wife of seven years, emerged before the PGA Championship at Valhalla a fortnight ago. Meanwhile last weekend the tour tragically lost one its own, a player with whom McIlroy had somewhat of a complicated relationship too. Grayson Murray’s suicide is, unsurprisingly, still a topic of much clubhouse conversation in the early part of this week. Wednesday morning was McIlroy’s first chance to address the death of the 30-year-old who publicly battled mental health and addiction issues.
“It’s incredibly sad, first and foremost, and we're all thinking of Grayson's family and hoping that they're getting through this incredibly tough period,” said McIlroy, who reportedly slapped down Murray in that Toronto meeting last June with a jibe about his sub-par performances.
"I think, you know, it's cliche, but it puts everything in perspective. At the end of the day golf is golf and, yeah, we play it for a living but it pales in comparison to the things that actually matter in life.” #
Too often in golf, perspective is harder found than fairways. It loses the run of itself with ease. McIlroy is one of the game’s most measured yet in early May even he somehow found himself comparing the LIV standoff to Good Friday Agreement talks. Evidently a lot has happened since then.
“I've had to realize that at times and I'm still sort of working my way through that in terms of not making golf the be-all end-all for me,” he added.
"I think it slaps you in the face when something like [Murray’s death] happens. Everyone has to remember out here that we go out and we do things that a lot of people can't, but at the end of the day we're still human beings, and we're vulnerable and we're fragile. I think if there's a lesson for anyone out there it's just to be kinder to each other.”
For its part, Canada has been kind to McIlroy. He won here in Hamilton in 2019 and after a pandemic hiatus returned to retain the title in 2022. He talked about his relationship with locals as “a love affair” and leaned on them to be kind to Harry Diamond Wednesday morning with a rendition of Happy Birthday for the caddie on the ninth tee.
Returning north, when many of the Tour’s big names have skipped it, offers another layer of freshness. McIlroy opted to take his week off immediately after Valhalla. With the likes of the New York Post busy digging into his divorce, the 35-year-old was elsewhere finding yet more necessary, if ironic, perspective.
“I certainly switched off,” he responded to the Examiner. “I went to one of my best friend's weddings in Italy for four days, which was a lot of fun, good to see a lot of people from home I haven't seen in a long time. It was actually a really good trip, I needed it. Then I had a lovely weekend at home. Spent time with my family and with Poppy and it was awesome. So I needed that reset.”
McIlroy has two Tour wins to his name in 2024 yet, after failing to fire on Saturday at Valhalla, a reset of sorts and, with it, an altered outlook could be particularly timely. This week kicks off a run with two signature events sandwiched either side of the US Open at Pinehurst in mid-June.
“I'm playing four weeks in a row, so, yeah, I'm ready to go. It's been a busy stretch and I'm sort of easing my way back into it,” McIlroy added. “I probably hit a grand total of 150 balls last week. Not that I feel rusty, I feel like I've played enough golf to keep myself ticking over, but last week was a good week to just reset and sort of start again.”
For a decade now, the framing of McIlroy has proven a vexing thing for, well, everyone. For the man himself too. A fifth Major hasn’t materialised, yet we know that he’s done and won everything else. Tommy Fleetwood was next into the media tent on Wednesday and answered a query about Scottie Scheffler’s dominance and the state of the game by saying “I still believe that Rory is the best of our generation”.
That theory will be re-examined over the next month as McIlroy, vulnerable, fragile and human, starts again.
