By Frank Pingue
AUGUSTA, Georgia (Reuters) – Rory McIlroy has had his fair share of Masters disappointment over the years but the Northern Irishman said on Tuesday he is ready to risk getting his heart broken again in an attempt to find true love in the form of a Green Jacket.
This year marks McIlroy’s 11th shot at completing the career Grand Slam of golf’s four majors, and he is ready to put himself out there after ditching the “self-preservation mechanism” he has leaned on to avoid getting hurt again.
“People, I think, instinctively as human beings we hold back sometimes because of the fear of getting hurt, whether that’s a conscious decision or subconscious decision, and I think I was doing that on the golf course a little bit for a few years,” McIlroy told reporters.
“Once you go through those heartbreaks, as I call them, or disappointments, you get to a place where you remember how it feels and you wake up the next day and you’re like, yeah, life goes on, it’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be.
“You dust yourself off and you go again. I think that’s why I’ve become a little more comfortable in laying everything out there and being somewhat vulnerable.”
With two wins under his belt in 2025, McIlroy has never arrived at the Masters in better form but that success has only ramped up talk about him becoming the sixth player to complete the career Grand Slam.
For his part, McIlroy is doing all he can to avoid letting that narrative distract his Green Jacket dreams, and off the course has been watching the Netflix series “Bridgerton” and reading a John Grisham novel.
“Just trying to block out that noise as much as possible. I need to treat this tournament like all the other tournaments that I play throughout the year,” McIlroy said.
“I understand the narrative and the noise, and there’s a lot of anticipation and buildup coming into this tournament each and every year, but I just have to keep my head down and focus on my job.”
For the 35-year-old McIlroy, however, who has not won a major since collecting his fourth in 2014 despite being a perennial leaderboard fixture, the Masters is far from just any other tournament.
McIlroy, who squandered a four-shot lead in the final round of the 2011 Masters, has seven top-10 finishes at Augusta National. Only four players have more top-10 finishes without ever winning a Green Jacket — Tom Kite (12 top 10s), Lloyd Mangrum (12), Greg Norman (9) and Gene Littler (8).
After his final tune-up event in Houston McIlroy revealed that his right elbow had been bothering him but the world number two said it has been taken care of and a non-issue going into Thursday’s opening round.
“Elbow is good,” McIlroy said. “I got a little bit of treatment on it last week, and it’s all good.”
(Reporting by Frank Pingue, editing by Ed Osmond)
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