If Rory McIlroy continues to make such a mockery of Augusta National, he will be lucky to see out the weekend without a stiff reprimand from the folk in green jackets. They treasure the ferocity of their fabled course and he’s turned it into playground.
At 12 under par through 36 holes, he is not only dominating the field but toying with it, summed up by one number that stood above any other after a truly magnificent second round of 65 – he is a full six shots clear of Sam Burns and Patrick Reed and no halfway lead here has ever been larger. Blimey.
We will add at this stage that it is Augusta and it is McIlroy. One is a golfing paradise that is so much more savage than it looks and the other is a man who has never knowingly fought with his chin tucked. We know he can be flattened.
But we also knew that once the Masters monkey left his back, there was always potential for the man himself to become a menace. It has taken some time for that metamorphosis to occur, but this round was the delivery. The peak. The proof of what he can do without fear in that complicated mind of his. It was an exhibition of the uninhibited.
The highlights? They are easy to find but hard to isolate from a loop featuring nine birdies, including six in the final seven holes. Chipping in from a hollow off the 17th green would be one – it was so perfect, so precise in where it pitched at the entrance to a gully between subtle slopes, that even a miss would have sent the ball only one foot beyond the hole.
That was stunning. But we could also focus on how McIlroy recovered from a drive into a fairway bunker at the second, leaving him behind such a steep lip he could advance only 130 yards down the par-five. Wedge in hand, he then put the ball to six feet to set up the first of three straight birdies.
When he hit turbulence with bogeys at five and 10, he might have backed away from the driver – it wasn’t as loose as Thursday, but it was misbehaving a little. And yet he gave a fun insight into his 2026 psyche after his first round, when he said it was easier to swallow mistakes, and to hold true to an aggressive gameplan, if you know a green jacket and a Coke Zero is waiting in the clubhouse. A free McIlroy around here is evidently a wrecking ball.
Some hope for the chasers might come from evidence of his vulnerabilities, such as the wonkiness of his driving. But even that is a complicated argument – he has missed all four fairways on the par-fives for two straight days and yet left with seven birdies from the same eight opportunities. Maybe the driving is less a source of optimism for his rivals, therefore, and more of a worry: as in, if he is this good without his best club in full flow, what in the name of Amen Corner will he do if it ignites?
For the sake of the tournament, the hope might be for a challenge from below. Given their personal history, a showdown with Reed would be fun. As a past champion with a propensity to arouse controversy, Reed might even get under McIlroy’s skin – he beat him in a glorious showdown at the 2016 Ryder Cup and their animosity was shown clearer by the surreal tee-gate ruckus in Dubai three years ago.
Reed’s two rounds of 69 on this course point to a man in strong shape. Remember, it has barely been a day since the likes of Shane Lowry and many others feared Augusta would play its toughest in living memory, baked hard by a hot sun and no forecast of rain.
It was a little easier on Friday, true, but still brutish enough to drop Bryson DeChambeau below the cut line, sent on his way by a triple bogey at the last. Jon Rahm survived on the number – four over. Great Scottie Scheffler? He drowned two balls in double bogeys at 13 and 15 – at level par, McIlroy is beyond even him.
At least the European contenders have him in their distant eyeline – Lowry, Justin Rose and Tommy Fleetwood are all at five under. Tyrrell Hatton is one further back after one of the finest and most composed loops of his life and barely put a stroke or syllable out of place.
That he hit every single green in regulation across his 66 strokes is worthy of unique praise – with more than 9,000 Masters rounds completed over its history, Hatton became only the third man to pull it off.
‘It was nice to be at that score and not hacking it round and over par like I generally do around here,’ said Hatton. A three-putt bogey at the last, his only blemish all day, at least allowed him to avoid the unfamiliar sensation of unbridled joy.
In any case, his relationship with a course he once seemed to loathe appears to be improving.
Uncharacteristically, Rose spent much of his loop in a grouch about his putting and possibly his caddie, too. But he carded a 69 to occupy five under, same as Lowry, who notched three birdies, 15 pars and zero bogeys for an identical outcome. Fleetwood had a wilder ride than both – as with the first round, he was a colossus on the greens, which helped secure eagles on the eighth and 15th holes.
If there was a curiosity, it was Fleetwood’s outfit, constructed from two shades of brown. How wonderful it would be if he broke his major duck and upgraded to a shade of green, but this newer version of McIlroy will likely have a say about that.
