The 2025 major championship season sets up undeniably well for Rory McIlroy.
The PGA Championship will be at Quail Hollow in Charlotte, where McIlroy has won the Wells Fargo Championship no fewer than four times. The Open Championship will return to Royal Portrush in his native Northern Ireland, where he once broke the course record by shooting a 61 at age 16.
But there’s one major that McIlroy obviously pines for above all. The only one missing from his résumé — the one that would complete the sixth career Grand Slam in modern history.
McIlroy arrives at Augusta National in such optimal form that we have to wonder — if 2025 isn’t the year he captures the Masters, is it ever going to happen?
Not to sound alarmist about one of the greatest golfers of this millennium, but McIlroy has already seen plenty of chances to nab his green jacket come and go. He turns 36 next month, and while he doesn’t have the injury history of Tiger Woods, it’s not reasonable to expect him to play this well forever.
McIlroy enters this week atop the FedEx Cup standings thanks to victories at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and the Players Championship, where he beat two incredibly strong fields. No one on tour is gaining more strokes per round than him — McIlroy’s putting it well and, as usual, striping everything off the tee.
His second-place finish in 2022 and T-22 last year came in the shadow of champion Scottie Scheffler, who’s been a Tiger-esque dominant force in golf the past few years but has finally slowed down just a bit. Scheffler has yet to win a tournament in 2025, ostensibly leaving the door ever so slightly ajar for his chief competition.
But we’ve done this dance before: “Look out everyone, it’s Rory’s time!” His major championship drought has reached a full 10 seasons and counting, with a mesmerizing 21 top-10 finishes in majors since his last breakthrough — enough near misses to turn someone mad.
Whether he wins this week is entirely up to McIlroy and what’s between his ears. I know if I blew chances to win back-to-back U.S. Opens — falling to Wyndham Clark and then Bryson DeChambeau — my skin would start crawling when I reached the biggest stage in golf.
McIlroy’s mental toughness is at the center of his plans for the week.
“It’s just narratives. It’s noise,” he said Tuesday. “It’s just trying to block out that noise as much as possible. I need to treat this tournament like all the other tournaments that I play throughout the year.
“Look, I understand the narrative and the noise, and there’s a lot of anticipation and buildup coming into this tournament each and every year, but I just have to keep my head down and focus on my job.”
When Sergio Garcia won the Masters for the first time in 2017, he did so in his 19th start — the most tries of any golfer before breaking through at Augusta. Thursday will mark McIlroy’s 17th career start.
I’m not saying he won’t win majors in his 40s — Woods and Jack Nicklaus did. But the Scheffler-led next generation is stronger than ever. “There’s always next year” will, someday, no longer apply.
