It wasn't meant to be.”Įarlier that morning, he’d awoken to look out at the scoreboard looming overhead, and he’d seen his own name at the very top.
“As soon as I passed the hole, I was like, well, that was … I gave it a good shot. I wasn't really trying to go for the T2 with Cameron Young at that point,” he said. “It was either hole it or nothing, really. He needed a miracle that wouldn’t come, an eagle chip that - like so many others on Sunday - just wouldn’t drop. (Stuart Franklin/R&A/R&A via Getty Images)Īnd so that left him standing in the 18th fairway, 27 yards from the pin, almost directly in front of the Rusacks Hotel. Rory McIlroy let the British Open slip from his fingers. If I had made the birdies there from good positions, it probably would have been a different story.” I did what I felt like I needed to, just apart from capitalizing on the easier holes - around the turn, 9, 12, 14. “It's just one of those days where I played a really controlled round of golf.
“I felt like I didn't do much wrong today, but I didn't do much right either,” McIlroy said after the round. Andrews, McIlroy could hear the cheers ahead of him, could see Smith carving his way deeper and deeper into red numbers. While McIlroy parred his way around the course, and while his playing partner Viktor Hovland was falling off the pace, Smith grew from curiosity to annoyance to threat to existential danger. And McIlroy, for his part, was just the tiniest bit short, just the smallest fraction wide. I just couldn't find the shots or the putts to do that.”įrom the 10th hole on, Smith just would. Coming down on 14, I knew that at that point Cam had birdied to go to 19 and I was at 18, so I knew that I needed to respond. Playing controlled golf, McIlroy said, worked “until I needed to respond to what Cam was doing out there. A four-stroke lead should have been enough to hold off any competition … unless the competition is dropping five birdies in a row. So it’s no small irony, then, that on a day when McIlroy played some of the smartest golf he’s ever played, he needed more of the strut. It’s as primal a stance of aggression as golf will allow, and for McIlroy, it all too often leads to a round-killing mistake - an overcooked drive, a wayward approach, a skidding putt that doesn’t end anywhere near the pin. He’ll stride off the tee and down the fairway like he owns the joint, shoulders back, chest out. McIlroy is famous for the strut he adopts when things are going well. I'll have other chances to win the Open Championship and other chances to win majors” - but this has to burn like nothing since his collapse on the 10th at Augusta National in 2011. He kept his perspective, as usual - “At the end of the day, it's not life or death. Not long before Smith would begin speculating how many beers fit in the Claret Jug - his assumption: two - McIlroy was doing what he almost always does, facing the music even as yet another disappointing major settled down on his shoulders. With that kind of discrepancy, it’s only a matter of time before the pursuer overtakes the leader. This was a “duel” in the same way that someone walking alongside train tracks as a locomotive approaches is a “race.” McIlroy just never got his putter going he ranked 55th in the number of putts this week, while Smith ranked second.
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