Around 90 minutes after Rory McIlroy emerged from his latest examination of sanity within Augusta National, the man responsible for keeping that mind in a sensible place picks up the phone.
That would be Dr Bob Rotella, who by varying descriptions is McIlroy’s psychologist, guru or sage. Given McIlroy’s affinity for implosions, he might well be the 15th club in the bag.
‘What a day,’ Rotella says after picking up. ‘What a darn day. Golf, huh? And this guy.’
This guy indeed. The guy who led the Masters by a record margin on Friday, coughed it up entirely on Saturday, only to win and lose and win all over again on the Sunday. While that was at its most frenzied and turbulent, with McIlroy falling two behind on the front nine, Rotella, a man in his eighties, repeatedly found himself being drawn to the histrionics of his own wife.
Her reaction in front of the television at home in Virginia was doubtless being replicated around the world.
‘She was shouting at all kinds, getting on her feet, being swept away,’ he laughs. ‘Me, I try to be what I tell my players to be – calm. I try to put my mind where theirs are, and the thing about Rory, his strength, is that when it looks like it is going wrong, he has learnt to keep himself calm. So I tried to stay calm. I mostly did it, too.’
Whether McIlroy ever truly holds to the zen state of this depiction is open to debate. From the outside, he is a compelling whirlwind of thoughts and temptations that always lead him to the utmost drama. Perhaps the progress is those dramas have now shaped into what once seemed like impossible outcomes: the scaling of the Masters mountain not once but twice.
It was in the glorious aftermath, on Sunday evening, that McIlroy described one of the key moments in this latest ascent. That came on Saturday, when he had allowed his six-stroke lead to become a standing-start against Cameron Young after becoming the only man on the leaderboard to fall short of an under-par round. Without elaboration, McIlroy would briefly detail how he had made contact with Rotella, the same man he turned to after a nightmare start to his 2025 campaign.
‘That’s right, we communicated,’ says Rotella. What follows does not sound like rocket science but these are the wisdoms that evidently penetrate the McIlroy psyche when the going gets tough.
‘I told him a few things, mostly by text,’ Rotella says. ‘I told him you have a steel will. You do not break. You are strong and, remember, the shot that matters is the next one.
‘This guy, he can hit all the shots. So long as there are holes in front of him, he can always make up ground, if he just stays in the moment. That’s what I told him.
‘Our process isn’t outcome, it is being present. Rory had a difficult day Saturday if we look at the outcome, but he is probably one of the only guys in the field who could get a 73 from that round. He did that by staying strong. He wasn’t collapsing, he was digging in and in my view, he did a heck of a job of it.
‘Then he came out again the next day and got it done. That is a calm mind.’
As ever, the talk will turn to what comes next. McIlroy now has six majors via a level of golf that wasn’t especially close to his best – across the week, he scored his driving a B-, his irons a B and his short game an A+. ‘That won me the tournament,’ he said.
The temptation here is two-fold – to wonder how far McIlroy will travel with a sustained A-game and ever-decreasing neuroses brought on by his climb to Masters greatness, but also where he stands against Scottie Scheffler. That the World No 1 finished one stroke behind with what was arguably his C-game for chunks of the week makes it an interesting debate.
For now, McIlroy still seems to have the higher ceiling when it comes to adrenaline runs and birdie charges, but the average level of Scheffler across a tournament will always be a smarter bet across four rounds. There is a good reason Scheffler has racked up numbers unseen since Tiger Woods – he makes substantially fewer mistakes than McIlroy.
But this is McIlroy’s week, even if the collective hope is to see both men blend their peaks for a rivalry that illuminates several seasons. To date, that hasn’t quite happened – when one rises, it seems to coincide with a fall from the other.
As for McIlroy, the immediate goal is to avoid the inertia that followed his 2025 triumph, starting with the PGA Championship in Philadelphia in May. He believes he won’t tumble back down the mountain as he did last time.
‘I think last year was the culmination of trying to win the Grand Slam and win the Masters for the first time – win my first major in 10 years,’ he said. ‘It was all of it together. This is obviously amazing. It’s my second Green Jacket. It’s very cool, but I really don’t think I’m going to have the lull I had last year.
‘I was trying to figure out, “OK, what’s next?” Because I have been through that I realised what’s next is you just keep trying to have more success and keep winning the biggest tournaments.
He added: ‘I was glad last year that the whole Grand Slam thing was done because that was what I was chasing.’
‘And now going forward it’s just, you know, everything is icing on the cake or a cherry on top, all gravy, whatever you want to call it. But I feel like I can just go and play my game and have a chance to win a lot more majors.’
The calm old man in his corner believes that is eminently achievable.
‘I wouldn’t put any limit on what Rory can do,’ he says. ‘People have tried to do that for years. All I know is that he will have a ball finding out what is possible.’
