Rory McIlroy Wins Players Championship Without Best Stuff

Q: How can we tell The Players isn’t really a major championship?

A: Because Rory McIlroy won it.

I kid, folks. Just a wee bit of banter. Don’t tell the Twitter people – they won’t take it with the proper levity.

And yet…

There’s some truth in every punchline.

All of which is why, within minutes of McIlroy capturing his second career Players victory in a Monday playoff over J.J. Spaun, our collective thoughts turned to what this all means for next month, when he drives down Magnolia Lane yet again in search of that elusive green jacket and grand slam title.

A few things before we get swept away in wondering whether McIlroy (+650) should actually be the rightful Masters favorite over Scottie Scheffler (+450) right now, despite having gone more than a decade without a major victory.

His triumph at TPC Sawgrass came just a week after he was tinkering and tweaking with his bag setup, switching out woods and wedges during the Arnold Palmer Invitational. It was enough to make any observer muse that perhaps he didn’t care about winning in the moment as much as he cares about prepping for The One That Got Away next month.

That was hardly the only noise emanating from Camp Rory recently.

During a Tuesday practice round at The Players, he hooked a tee shot on the 18th hole into the water, only to be heckled by a young fan whose friend was diligent in capturing the moment on his phone. McIlroy grabbed the phone and had the fan removed before returning it undamaged. In a strange twist of events, it turns out that fan was University of Texas junior Luke Potter, who’d won a collegiate tournament at Sawgrass Country Club the previous day and had already been congratulated by fellow Longhorns such as Scheffler and Jordan Spieth.

That singular action was enough to make the game’s most polarizing player even more so, with fans picking sides as to whether he was well within his right to launch a peaceful protest against the fan or whether he was being too “soft” in giving the reaction any attention at all.

It didn’t end there, either.

Getting both the PGA Tour Champions generation and the YouTube generation angry at separate comments from the same press conference isn’t something every golfer can pull off, but the 35-year-old did exactly that in his pre-tournament interview session.

“I will not play Champions Tour golf,” he explained. “Look, I’ve said a lot of absolutes in my time that I’ve walked back, but I do not envision playing Champions Tour golf. Something has went terribly wrong if I have to compete at golf at 50.”

In the very next breath, after being asked about the Creator Classic that was contested at TPC Sawgrass one day before the opening round, he confidently stated, “I don’t feel like I’m of the generation, but I can obviously see the intrigue and look, it’s cool for some people, but I don’t think it’s quite for my generation.”

On their own, and done or said by just about any other golfer in the world, none of these would incite any sort of massive controversy, but put ‘em all together and you have an elite-level player on the verge of one of the year’s biggest tournaments with plenty of drama swirling around him.

Tiger Woods has spoken over the years about the necessity for compartmentalization – especially in golf, which is as much a mental pursuit as physical or technical.

Therein lies the most impressive aspect of McIlroy’s win.

It wasn’t just that he prevailed with something less than his A-game. “By no means did I have my best stuff this week,” he admitted in the aftermath. The irons and putter were working for him in the opening round, he drove it on a string Friday, ball-struck it Saturday, and the putter once again joined the irons for Sunday’s final stanza.

It was that he got it done with so much noise hovering around him.

For as much as the masses might be more inspired by an eight-stroke winning differential when all 14 clubs in the bag are firing on every cylinder, it might be more impressive, if we’re honest with ourselves, to witness a performance such as this.

With parts of his game failing him during the week, with reporters hurling questions toward him about off-course incidents, with social media screaming about his actions, McIlroy simply went out and got the job done. It often wasn’t pretty, as evidenced by a three-putt bogey on the second of a three-hole aggregate playoff and lackluster bogey on the last.

The result should only fill Rory with more confidence moving forward. He knows he won without his best stuff. He knows there’s room for improvement. And he knows the big one that he wants more than any other is just a few weeks away.

If he can keep it going all the way to Augusta and beyond, that punchline will be deemed invalid. Instead, it’ll be McIlroy who’s laughing last.