AUGUSTA, Ga. — Rory McIlroy looked like a beaten man as he trudged from the ninth green to the 10th tee on Friday, his 4-over score pu🎉tting him in serious danger of missing the Masters cut, when he noticed a young girl leaning over a gꦏallery rope and holding out her hand for a slap.
Most players in his position would have completely ignored her, but this was Rory McIlroy, beloved ambassador of his game, so he reached out a hand to acknowledge her, even if he wasn’t in the mood to ma💜𒈔ke the slap happen.
Once the lost boy of Augusta National, the 33-year-old McIl🍰roy still has no clue how to tame this course.
He shot 5-over 77 in the second round and missed the cut for the second time in⭕ three years, ending another bid꧂ to join Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, Ben Hogan and Gene Sarazen as the only men to win the modern career Grand Slam.
Early in the week, McIlroy pointed to his second-place finish behind Scottie Scheffler at the 2022 Masters — punc﷽tuated by his 64 and incredible hole-out from ⛎a bunker at the 18th — as reason to believe his 15th appearance at Augusta National would finally end his quest.
“I felt last year that I maybe shed some of that scar🌞 tissue and felt like I sort of made breakthroughs🍨,” McIlroy said. “Yeah, I’m feeling as sort of relaxed as I ever have coming in here just in terms of I feel like my game is in a pretty good place. I know the place just about as well as anyone.”
Not quite.
After shootinꦓg even par in the opening round on Thursday, McIlroy called his start “not disastrous.”
He said he merely needed to tidy up a few things to g𝐆et back in the tournament.
But Friday was an unholy mess he couldn’t clean🦂 up.
McIlroy bogeyed four 🐎of his first seven holes to fall a country mile behind leader Brooks Koepka, who finished his second round at 12-under.
McIlroy ultimately finished 13 stroke🎶s behind amateur Sam Bennett, nine strokes behind 52-year-old Phil Mickelson and five strokes behind 63-year-old Fred Couples.
He ended up in a tie with 65-year-old Bernhard Langer, then declined intervi🍷ew requests.
Asked the other day what McIlroy, a four-time major champ, needed to do to win this tournament, Couples said: “Nothing. He’s just got to play golf and be better than everyone. … [If] he just does his own deal and plays like Rory can🍃, he’ll be just fi𓆏ne. Then he’s got to beat two, four, five people on Sunday.”
But McIlroy won’t be playing this Sunday, though people have long said that his game matches up perfectly with Augusta 𝐆National.
“But they said the same thing about Ernie Els, Greg Norman,” McIlroy had said of other notable golfers who never won the Masters. “This course is tailor-made for those players and they haven’t [gone]🧜 on to wiജn a green jacket. That’s always in my mind, too. It’s not just because a place is deemed perfectly set up for your game. It doesn’t automatically mean that you’re going to win it one day.”