PORTRUSH, Northern Ireland – The ground shuddered as Darren Clarke stepped to the raucous first tee at the 2006 Ryder Cup at the K Club outside Dublin, the potent combination of his desire to honor his recently deceased wife and his Northern Irish roots creating an unforgettable frenzy.
“Nothing can compare with what I went through on that first tee,” Clarke once said of the scene. “There will never be a harder shot or hole for me to play.”
To some degree relative to the moment, Rory McIlroy will experience a similar scene Thursday at The Open when he tees off for the opening round just past 5 a.m. ET. Although McIlroy didn’t lose a close family member, and as he explained this week’s Open will be nothing like a Ryder Cup, it would be impossibly foolish to think this is just another championship for the 30-year-old Ulsterman.
McIlroy grew up about an hour’s drive from Royal Portrush in the Belfast suburb of Holywood. As a 7-year-old he’d chip endlessly on the practice green while his father, Gerry, played the North of Ireland Amateur. For his 10th birthday Gerry McIlroy arranged a round on the Dunluce Links for young Rory and some say his now legendary career was launched on the seaside layout when he shot a course-record 61 at 16 years old during the North of Ireland.
But this goes well beyond familiarity and local bonds. For McIlroy and the other Northern Irishmen in this week’s field, The Open’s return to Portrush for the first time since 1951 is a seminal moment for an entire country. As keen as McIlroy is to make this week business as usual, it simply isn’t.
“One of my sort of mantras this week is: Look around and smell the roses,” McIlroy said on Wednesday. “This is a wonderful thing for this country and golf in general. And to be quite a big part of it is an honor and a privilege. And I want to keep reminding myself of that, that this is bigger than me; right? This is bigger than me.”
Perhaps. McIlroy didn’t single handedly shepherd The Open back to Northern Ireland. That groundswell began when Irishman Padraig Harrington won back-to-back Opens in 2007 and ’08 and picked up momentum when Graeme McDowell won the ’10 U.S. Open and fellow Northern Irishman Clarke hoisted the claret jug in ’11. But it was McIlroy who brought the metaphoric rain when he emerged as the game’s undisputed best with back-to-back major victories in 2014.
Full-field tee times from the 148th Open Championship
Full coverage of the 148th Open Championship
And it’ll be McIlroy who will be the focus of all Northern Irish eyes Thursday morning.
He’ll tell you that he’s simply one of 156 hopefuls this week – nothing more, nothing less. He’ll seek shelter in a competitive cocoon that has served him so well this year, and he’ll desperately focus on the process and not the result. He’ll say all the right things like he did Wednesday, figuring you can only want something so much.
But no amount of sports psychology mumbo jumbo can ignore the obvious. This Open is arguably the biggest sporting event ever held in Northern Ireland, which is no small accomplishment for a country that is just a single generation removed from devastating sectarian violence.
Although McIlroy, who was born a decade before the Good Friday Agreement was signed, ending the violence, was never a part of the country’s troubled past, he’s not oblivious to Northern Ireland’s history. His uncle was gunned down in 1972 by a pair of paramilitary members, but growing up that’s not the Holywood he remembers.
It wasn’t until recently when he watched the 2014 film “’71” based on a British soldier who became separated from his unit during a riot in Belfast at the height of the Troubles in 1971 that he began to understand. The soldier was stationed at Palace Barracks, which is about a par 5 from McIlroy’s childhood home, and the story prompted him to examine a subject that was always best left lost to memories.
“I remember asking my mom and dad, is this actually what happened?” McIlroy said.
It was about that same time that golf’s return to the Olympic Games pushed McIlroy into an identity crisis. The Rio Games prompted repeated questions as to whether he’d play for Ireland or Great Britain, and for the most part McIlroy impressively weaved his way through the decades-old political fray.
He would eventually commit to playing for Ireland in Rio before stepping down, like many top players, over concerns for the Zika virus, but the entire episode left McIlroy torn, maybe even resentful for having to make such a profound choice.
Next year’s Games in Japan will require another tough decision, but this time he at least seems resigned to his plight.
“I think personally I needed to do a lot of inner thought and sort of, ‘Is this important to me? Why do I want to play it? Who do I want to represent?’” McIlroy said. “I let other people’s opinions of me weigh on that decision. And at the end of the day, it’s my decision. I can’t please everyone.”
It’s all part of McIlroy’s complicated position as a Northern Irishman and an international sportsman. It’s why this week’s Open and McIlroy’s status as a reluctant front-man is much greater than the sum of its parts.
For many, this is just another Open Championship, but that’s not the case for McIlroy. If he’s being honest, he knows better. He knows this is much more than 72 holes of Grand Slam golf. He knows what it means to Northern Ireland after nearly seven decades of Open exile.
“It will be a massive thing for the country,” he acknowledged. “Sport has an unbelievable ability to bring people together. We all know that this country sometimes needs that. This has the ability to do that. Talking of legacy, that could be the biggest impact this tournament has outside of sport, outside of everything else, is the fact that people are coming here to enjoy it and have a good time and sort of forget everything else that sort of goes on.”
That will be the message the crowd will send as McIlroy heads to the thunderous first tee Thursday. It may not be the most important shot of his career, but it will be the most meaningful.
