Two days before the 2015 Masters, Rory McIlroy stepped out of his preview press conference clearly weary of answering the same question over and over about the career Grand Slam and whether he was about to join only five players in history to achieve that version of golf immortality.
The Tiger era was still far from spent at that point but as the great one approached his 40th birthday later that year, the search to find his successor was already landing on McIlroy who appeared to be on a major-winning schedule not far off what Woods had achieved by the age of 25.
Nine months earlier, after winning the Open at Hoylake, McIlroy had won his third different major championship during an imperious mid-summer run of form not seen since 'peak Tiger' more than a decade earlier.
Every year since 2015, up to finishing second in 2022 and missing the cut last year, there’s been a version of that press conference scenario on repeat every time he’s turned up for the Masters.
It has clearly become tiresome for him and this week he skipped all TV interviews and did just 10 minutes in the general Masters interview room where no one mentioned the words ‘career grand slam’ nor asked anything particularly challenging of him for that matter.
It might be the first time that’s happened in nearly a decade but there is still no escaping the pre-eminence of this week in McIlroy’s mind with the prospect over the next four days of his place in golf history being elevated to a career defining level.
He’s tried many different ways to approach the second weekend in April. There’ve been competitive weeks beforehand, like last week in Texas. He’s tried resting and practicing at home the week before the Masters and has tried dialling up the confident rhetoric like last year but also dialling it down, as has been the case this week.
On this occasion, there is one other significant looking difference in how he’s approaching the challenge of the 88th Masters and it involved a trip to Las Vegas for a kind of four-hour retreat at the veritable golf ashram of Butch Harmon who has always been as much a swing coach as a golfing sage.
There was, by reports, a lot more going on in their four hour ‘consultation’ than advice on swing-path, alignment or whatever technical nuance has been preventing McIlroy from finding consistency in his physical game this season.
McIlroy wasn’t seeking any radical change of coaching direction in Las Vegas. He and Harmon have done this before and two weeks ago, he was merely seeking was a fresh pair of eyes and some verbal reassurance from one of the most respected teachers in the game.
A few days after travelling back from Clark County Nevada, McIlroy teed it up at last week’s Valero Texas Open where he achieved by far his best PGA Tour finish of the year, courtesy mainly of a bogey-free closing 20 holes which contained eight birdies and a lot of ball striking statistics that revealed a sense that what ever happened in Vegas, certainly didn’t just stay there.
Only time will tell if this is a turning point for McIlroy whose best PGA Tour finish in 2024, prior to finishing third in the Texas Open, was a birdie-heavy but error-strewn tie for 19th place at the Players Championship last month.
There’s been some good stuff with his game this season, mostly off the tee, but he lies in 46th position in the Greens in Regulation category, a key metric to be a ‘master’ of this week. And his wedge play remains an issue that appears not to have gone away.
With playing partners over the first two rounds here like World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler and in-form World No. 5 Xander Schauffele, McIlroy will probably know quite quickly if the ‘Vegas recharge’ worked.
For Shane Lowry, he’s riding on a wave of confidence around Augusta after a third place finish in 2022 and a tie for 16th last year when he was on the fringes of contention inside the top five on the leaderboard early in the final round on Sunday.
Since partnering Tiger Woods for three rounds in the 2020 Masters, the Offaly man, who turned 37 last week, seems to have developed a level of comfort around Augusta National and has not finished outside of the top 25 since then.
There was even a brush with contending for the Green Jacket two years ago until a triple bogey six at the long par three fourth hole. He still rallied well to finish tied third but was disappointed afterwards.
"Nobody remembers who finished third at the Masters, so in 20 years time, finishing third doesn’t get you back through those gates. First does, so that’s the main goal," he said on Tuesday last.
Lowry comes into this week in good early season form including a tied 3rd place finish in the elevated Arnold Palmer Invitational which has seen him climb from 56th in the world to 36th in the space of a few weeks.
"I’m very happy with where my game is. I’m not here to make up the numbers. I’m here to compete," he concluded.
Lowry though accepts that to win the Masters means finishing ahead of Scottie Scheffler, the reigning World No. 1 and recent Players Championship winner, a title he claimed with a stellar closing round of 64 at Sawgrass last month.
When asked if he was in the category of serious potential challengers here he responded: "I’m very happy to be here but if you start looking at Scottie, Wyndham Clark and Rory McIlroy, it’s hard to look past those players but I’ll do my best to finish on top of them."
Clark is playing his first Masters after an 11 month period in which he has risen from outside the top 100 in the world to number 4 with victory in last year’s US Open and recent back to back runner-ups behind Scheffler at both the Arnold Palmer Invitational and the Players.
Last year’s first and second placed finishers, Jon Rahm and Brooks Koepka will lead a 13 strong contingent from the LIV series.
There have been only three events on that Tour this year so with just nine competitive rounds under their belts, it remains to be seen if either can summon the form which led to their absorbing duel for the green jacket a year ago.
