Rory McIlroy’s phone-grab rage was understandable. But also revealing

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — In the end, golf is not a game of birdies and bogeys. It is a game of what happens to you, and how you handle it.

“I don’t think there’s a way to forget about your mistakes,” Rory McIlroy said Friday at the Players Championship, the same day he shot a 68 to push himself into contention heading into the weekend. “I guess I just try to visualize and focus on what you want to do instead of thinking about what you don’t want to do or what you’ve done before.”

“If you can make that thought just a little bit more powerful than the previous one, then that’s the secret.”

The 30 or so seconds that followed Rory McIlroy’s 18th hole tee shot in his Tuesday afternoon practice round were so unusual, so out-of-character, that it has been tempting to dismiss them altogether for most of Players Championship week. But as the conversation surrounding the phone-grab has morphed from a moment of blind rage into a much larger reflection of McIlroy’s character, it has become clear that McIlroy’s actions were not random. They were a window into one of golf’s most enigmatic figures — and what unfolded has defined his week thus far at the PGA Tour’s biggest event.

What happened? Among the fans watching McIlroy on the 18th tee were a pair of University of Texas golfers. After McIlroy snap-hooked a drive into the water left of the fairway, one of the Longhorns — 20-year-old junior Luke Potter — heckled McIlroy with a reference to the 2011 Masters. McIlroy could have ignored the dig but he didn’t. He confronted Potter and his teammate, snatched the teammate’s phone and walked off with it. Potter was ejected from the tournament. (The phone was eventually returned.)

Whatever Potter said exactly, the spirit of his comment was not just unseemly, it was cruel. McIlroy’s meltdown on the final nine holes of the 2011 Masters remains one of the most viscerally painful moments of his professional career, and the 14 years of torment that have followed him at Augusta National have only amplified the depth of his initial pain. At this point, building a schedule each year in the hopes of peaking at Augusta must feel to Rory a bit like wearing a Wagyu suit in front of a hungry Grizzly. Yes, the rope line at a golf tournament does strange things to people, but it is reasonable for McIlroy to expect that he will not regularly face broadsides about his life’s most tortured moments in the seconds after dunking a tee shot. Anyone arguing otherwise must ask themselves earnestly if the standard for human decency has fallen so low as to place blame on McIlroy for “expecting” better treatment.

Yet, in the same breath, professional sports can be cruel. Contemptuous behavior happens, whether athletes should find themselves on the receiving end of it or not. For better or worse, hate and pettiness are parts of the gig for those paid millions to play golf. And for better or worse, those who try to avoid or challenge it are usually subjected to more of it. Bryson DeChambeau was tortured mercilessly for his beef with Brooks Koepka at the Memorial Tournament in 2021, and when fans learned he’d instructed security to remove those who yelled at him, the heckling ballooned into a yearslong lampooning.

McIlroy knows this, which is why he did his best to avoid commenting on the debacle when asked about it Thursday afternoon at Sawgrass. Even for a player with a vulnerable history with the press, fanning the flames of an embarrassing-all-the-way-around story was an obvious no-go.

“No,” he said, when a member of the press asked if the subject was kosher to speak about.

Why?

“Because I don’t want you to [ask about it].”

In the end, those efforts were fruitless. When video of the transgression surfaced online, Rory was filleted on social media. On property at Sawgrass, fans also grumbled about McIlroy’s “soft” reaction. He will almost surely be subjected to a weekend of fans eager to remind him of the phone-grab, as one did on the 18th tee box on Friday morning.

“Take my phone, Rory!!”

The human brain is remarkably resilient. People live through unthinkable trauma and unfathomable heartbreak every day, and yet the world also is filled with stories of those who have achieved fabulous success despite — and, in some cases, because of — these circumstances.

McIlroy is an example of both. He is by every objective measure one of the most talented and successful golfers ever, and yet those same gifts have yielded him unusual doses of heartache, like at the 2011 Masters, the 2024 U.S. Open or any of the soul-crushing weeks in between that have filled a decade-long major drought.

While the scope of McIlroy’s trauma can be limited to a silly game that has also made him fabulously rich, the existence of his trauma is nonetheless very real. Fourteen years later, no one would blame Rory if his Masters meltdown still brought him intense feelings of embarrassment and regret. His U.S. Open collapse last summer is no different.

These emotions do not make him unusual, or weak — they make him human. Just as the coping mechanisms he leaned upon in those moments of personal disaster were similarly (and involuntarily) human. If McIlroy wanted to push these feelings far away from public view, in a place where someone routinely subject to public criticism might not have to reckon with them often, it would not serve as proof of weakness or immaturity. It would serve as proof only that he has a pulse.

Regrettably, though, the human brain has a way of making sure that we cannot delete these feelings. The more time we spend trying to repress the emotions we like least, the more prominent they tend to become. Freud called it “repetition compulsion” — or our unconscious tendency to repeat painful behaviors and situations to gain mastery over them.

This is where the Tuesday incident proves revealing. McIlroy faced a careless insult that cut him deeply and reacted in a way he surely regrets. That he experienced a burst of blind rage in a practice round does not make him a bad person. But that he felt enabled to react so aggressively to such ancient history suggests that, to him, it might not feel ancient at all.

Of course, only McIlroy can answer as to his emotions and lived experiences — and this is an area in which he has been remarkably honest over the years. If he does not wish to speak any further about his heartbreaks, that is his right.

Still, it will not be hard to learn the result of McIlroy’s efforts to patch those wounds. We will see it on the course. Can you see the shot and hit it, even with the implicit knowledge of your own shortcomings, mistakes and failures? That is the essential question of golf — and, in many ways, of life.

The journey to the ultimate destination cannot be measured in 30 seconds, 30 days or 30 years. It is the challenge and the work of a lifetime. Even for Rory McIlroy.

What happened is history. Now comes the interesting part.

You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.