Chapter 1: What led Rory McIlroy to seek a second Masters title?
And I said, I want to win the league, but I want to win it better.
You can understand that, can't you?
Yes. Good lad. So he's almost like having a second captain in the team. Second captain, first captain, whatever.
Here we go. His year again. Rory is a rare repeat winner at Acosta.
My mum and dad. They weren't here last year to celebrate with us. And surprisingly, I had to convince them to come this year because they thought that the reason that I won was because they weren't here. Glad that we proved that wrong. But mum and dad, I owe everything to you. You are the most wonderful parents ever.
And if I can be half the parent to Poppy as you were to me, then I know I've done a good job. Thank you.
Ah, come on. This lad just wins the Masters, pulls at the heartstrings. It's an annual tradition. It's what Rory McIlroy does. There was no McIlroy has his masterpiece or shot of a lifetime killer line by Jim Nance this year. Work on your game for next year, Nance. But still, plenty of emotion. And as a little nod to last year, we've gone for some astral weeks by Van Morrison one more time.
Rory McIlroy is back-to-back US Masters champion. Ciarán Murphy is back from his holliers. Hey, Eoghan, how's it going? One of those things is a lot more exciting than the other. I'm as excited by both, Murph.
That's a bad one.
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Chapter 2: How did McIlroy's emotional journey influence his performance?
You know what I mean? You want to be a good, respectful distance from the holy mountain. So yeah, no, the foothills. Of course the foothills. I'm not going to climb Mount Fuji. McElroy climbed the mountain again last night, Murph. I walked 12 kilometres around Lake... Kawa Guchiko, one of the five finger licks around Mount Fuji. That's a lot of walking for a man in my condition.
He had a good line, Rory did, on all this kind of stuff we're talking about in this press conference.
I thought it was so difficult to win last year because of trying to win the Masters and the Grand Slam. And then this year I realised it's just really difficult to win the Masters. I tried to convince myself it was both, but...
He kept me going right to the end. Oh, yeah. I mean, to drive on 18s. Yeah. Like, what the hell are you doing? Like, what are you doing? It was absolutely just mad. Sadistic. You know, he knows that people are watching him. He knows that people... He knows a lot of people are watching him. Like, people have an emotional attachment to this man.
Which is why he did it on purpose. Because Faldo said he could easily just... He could literally just whack that into the bunker on the other side. No problem. He's guaranteed to win the Masters.
Yeah.
Rather than hitting it down that... It's the one place he couldn't go. But I'm saying that he did it on purpose to make it exciting for the viewers, knowing that everything is content.
You know I respect you. And my respect for you in many ways grows, you know, with a couple of weeks off. You know, you realise, you step away for a while and you go, you know that McDevitt for all his faults and all his foibles. Bloody good lad. I think you're wrong on this one.
Even before the tap-in put to win, was I the only person just slightly worried about that? He still has to execute a mechanical body movement and he's in tears crying. He steps up then just to tap it in. And I thought for a split second, has he missed that? Because the bloody camera didn't show it. It was blocked. You couldn't actually really see the put going in. On...
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Chapter 3: What role did technology play in following the Masters this year?
Russell Henley knew his role, you know, a bit of a charge, but like, come on. His eyes are very small and very close together. I'm just going to say that about Russell Henley. I never really studied him in depth. I mean, I know he's a Ryder Cup player. I know he's number 12 ranked golfer in the world. He's obviously very good at golf. But have I really stared at his face?
Have I really committed his face to memory until last night? I don't know.
I have to say, no. But what I loved about the aftermath, I don't know if you saw much of the Lowry stuff, you were probably in transit at the time. The entire chorus knows a hole-in-one has happened by that noise, or certainly anybody in the surrounding area knows. I think it was Harris English, one of the other golfers, Sky, had a great clip of him bowing down, you know.
It was either, could everyone quieten down or bowing down, but either way he was doing it in a jocular fashion. I would say. And actually Scheffler around that time is hitting an approach shot, which he messes up. And I don't know, Scotty Scheffler's not the kind of guy who gets distracted by stuff going on around the course. So I could be putting two and two together in five here.
But it did appear to me that he was taking that shot just as the roar happens for Lowry. So you could say Shane Lowry has contributed to Rory McIlroy's Masters win there. Every shot counts and Scheffler would have dropped a shot there, I'm sure. Michael Foley of the Sunday Times is with us. Michael, how are you? Very good, Eoin. How are you? Good, good, good.
Well, happy enough to chat about this. Gavin Cooney is en route home from Augusta. Where exactly are you, Gav?
I'm in the heart of America, Eoin. I'm at a Starbucks at the side of some motorway. Drive through Starbucks, which means it's actually fairly quiet. I'm the only person that seemingly has deigned to get out of the car. So if you do hear the steam of the coffee machine or whatever terrible music is playing in the background, I can only apologise.
At the heart of the real America there, Cabot, I'd like to see. You were in good company following McElroy around the place the last four days. Rafa Nadal, Rob Carney, Gareth Southgate.
Yeah. So I was standing right behind the 12th where McElroy hit in that amazing shot. And in a neat bit of nominative determinism, I believe the man standing in front of me was Premier League CEO Richard Masters, who was with
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Chapter 4: How did Rory McIlroy handle the pressure during the final round?
Maybe that's what's different about this year than it is last year, that when he had to play the delicate, conservative touch that he found it, whereas he didn't last year.
Yeah, he talked about the tee shot at 12 and in fact the tee shot at 13 when he was asked for his key shots in Butler's cabin. But I love that one on the putt on 16 from off the green. Just, you really have to, you really get to see a golfer watch one of their shots for that, one of their putts anyway for that long. You know, he's watching, he's going, I've done all the right things here.
I've followed my own instinct and my caddie's advice and what I've seen on TV down the years and Tiger's saying, I've done a load, I know I've done all this correctly. I've seen this green a good number of times. Now I just have to wait about 45 seconds for the thing to start turning and then going down towards the hole, which thankfully it did.
Michael, what did you make of how he got the job done?
Well, you know, it's really interesting to listen to someone like Gavin, who was obviously on the scene, and his perception of what we're watching on television with the comfort of the commentator and a little bit of analysis and the cam talk, you know, the cam talk. You know, yeah, he's just got to splash this one out to 15 feet. Like, my sense of it watching last night was...
I wasn't nervous at all through the whole thing. Even early on in the round when you were looking at the bogey, the double bogey, you were like, okay, you're even looking at McIlroy walking up the fairway on the seven and the head is down. But to me, it was more like, right, he's preparing himself now. He's really calibrating what needs to be done next. Where does he need to get to?
And funny enough, in the press conferences afterwards, he was kind of talking about, you know, he had recalibrated. He wanted to be level power, I think, by the turn. And somewhere along the way, he thought, you know, minus 14 would probably win this. So everything is getting recalibrated in his brain rather than going haywire. I'm not saying that didn't happen last year.
But that sense of sort of, okay, I have this, like, you know, I've won this tournament before. Like, all of his collective experience and success over the years has now been capped by winning the one tournament he always wanted to win. I know how to win this. So the only moment, I don't know about you guys, but the only moment I kind of got a little bit, oh, hey-ho, was the tee shot on 18.
But even at that... As he's walking away over towards the 10th fairway, you're going, this guy is the king shot maker. And this is one of the great shot making courses on the planet. Like he can also in his head, again, recalibrate this into a par five. So, you know, he just has to do the things that he is good at. And he did. And, you know, it was great.
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Chapter 5: What were the standout moments from Shane Lowry's performance?
The body language stinks. Then he goes to the back of six. At least he doesn't go left on that. But then he's put through the... pulled through the back of the green, kind of catches on the fringe as like a little parable for stolen momentum. He makes bogey there. And I had given up at that point, I have to say, because the body language was so bad and nothing was working.
And then he just found a fairway on seven. And then all of a sudden that kick started at birdie on seven. And then he got a lovely, that kind of signature now, whip of a six ironed, from the eighth fairway into, into make birdie there. And he was off to the races and he didn't hit another poor shot until the shot into 15, at which point he had a two shot lead.
So, um, to play amen corner as he did was, was magnificent, but I think maybe it's just that kind of stabilizing force of the green jacket already around the shoulders is probably what mitigated against the, the really wild, um, dramas that might have been possible yesterday that we obviously saw so amazingly last year.
You weren't the only one, Gav, relying on the manual changing of the scoreboard to keep you abreast of things. I felt like I needed to know where he was in the tournament, especially after the rough start. I was keeping an eye all day. I think people know this about McIlroy around Augusta and presumably elsewhere. He actually...
while maybe it wouldn't be Bob Rotella's advice, I would imagine, to be too obsessed about what's going on elsewhere. He, all through the day, and I mean, it's logical, you kind of need to know where you are in relation to your opponents to know what you need to do. And he's got no problem admitting it.
Yeah, I was like, and you could see him sometimes working out who's where exactly, because those scoreboards can look a little bit confusing, those big manuals. And he's like, oh, okay, yeah. And then he goes on and takes his shot. So he's got no problem admitting that.
Oh, no, totally. And I suppose it's when you look at them. Like, I remember in 2023, he came in in great form. Like, we thought that this was going to be the year, and he missed the cut. And he said the mistake he made was, I think Brooks Koepka was the early leader.
He looked at that leaderboard on eight, so Koepka, four, five, six shots in, whatever it was, and then started, oh, my God, I'm way behind. I need to start making the miracle shot here. And again, Augusta National is a...
is a test of patience you know you're not allowed it frowns on anything like desperation so you're not allowed to run around the course uh you gotta walk you're not allowed asked to be a member you've got to be selected for it so if you're gonna win the masters you can't be seen to want to do desperately and that was the sin of the 17 odd years of mcelroy's master's career until he finally went and did it um so but you at some point you need to be abreast of the score line to decide on
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Chapter 6: How did McIlroy's family impact his victory at the Masters?
But, I mean, this is the thing. This lad has lived with expectation since he was popping golf balls into a washing machine on UTV. So, you know, I often kind of think about elite sports, like, you know, I try to think about elite sport like this, that what we see as superhuman, it is partly superhuman, but it's based on a God-given ability combined with...
a man-made work ethic that's beyond, that's right there at the very top of that kind of ladder. So, like, what we find, what we imagine to be impossible is entirely plausible to him.
You know what I mean? Even more so now that he's got the confidence and he's got the career grand slam, you know?
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's that gap. I mean, I've been thinking about this, you know, obviously he wins it last night. You know, he's already the greatest, you know, European golfer of all time. He's, you know, greatest Irish golfer of all time.
He's right there with the greatest the world has ever seen, which automatically makes him, in my mind, the greatest Irish sports person we've ever had. And kind of trying to figure out our relationship with our greats, you know.
And I think as a nation, as a people, I think sometimes we struggle with that a little bit to kind of actually figure out Rory McIlroy or figure out whoever else you want to put into that category, you know. What do you mean we have trouble figuring it out? Well, it kind of hit me. I was reading Dave Hannigan's book about Roy Keane there that came out recently. We need to talk about Roy.
And I mean, for anyone who hasn't read that yet, it's a very interesting sort of... It kind of walks you through Keane's career and his life and... in parallel with how Ireland has changed and how the world has changed around Keane and how the two are linked. And I was reading this around the same time that Ronnie Delaney passed away.
And it just got me thinking about these are two absolute all-time greats. But I would argue that even the fact that Dave wrote that book, we've never really got a handle on how Keane's mind works. What drove him as a player, really? I don't think we ever really got that. And even if we kind of did, we were almost afraid to go too far into it to figure it out. Ronnie Delaney was an all-time...
Great athlete, one of our greatest sports people of all time. He came home after an injury when he retired and he was penniless after two years. It wasn't like he was greeted like a returning hero. He had to make his way. And, you know, when I started thinking back through others like that, we struggle sometimes. I think it's just part of our culture.
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Chapter 7: What comparisons are drawn between McIlroy and other great athletes?
You know, here's a guy who went to the PGA Tour and initially felt guilty about winning. He felt it was kind of almost indecent or a bit big headed. And I'm sorry, that is the most Irish thing I've ever heard. I mean, judge a man by his actions rather than his words. So I completely agree with Mick.
What this guy is doing is absolutely remarkable that he's come from a tiny place in Northern Ireland is remarkable as well. What his parents have done is unbelievable to work as hard as they did to sacrifice as much as they've done and still seemingly not burdened him with too much pressure.
Like the amazing little tidbit in that Amazon documentary is that Jerry McElroy would change the scorecard. So a par four, he made a par five. So Rory would come in thinking he made birdie and feeling great about himself. Like there's that lovely little flick of this is a place where you need to feel good and positive about what you're doing to excel.
There's a great lesson in there for sporting parents. So, um, I, yeah, look again, like I was, and again, to melt listeners with the smugness emanating from Augusta, but walking up 18 yesterday with another Irish journalist to turn around and said, like, lads, we are, aren't we so lucky to be here and be following this guy at this time. And it's true.
Like, you know, I know we're trying not be fans of typewriters and God knows macro is not perfect, but, um, to be able to watch this guy play, to chronicle what he's doing, is unbelievable.
Yeah, I mean, I remember a time when Irish players just didn't play at the Masters. You know, like the Masters of the late 80s and 90s, there just weren't, Irish players did not play in the Masters. And now we have McElroy and, of course, we also have Shane Lowry.
Last year was something of a culmination of a life's work, you know, McElroy's masterpiece, all that kind of stuff, Michael. But it was something that with his talent and his ambition, we all expected him to achieve. So to go and back it up straight away and do it again, does that elevate him further in your mind? And if so, how much?
Quite a lot by the sounds of it, the fact that he's done it again straight away.
That's the one. That's the tipping point for me. Like, if you ask me who's the greatest Irish sportsperson, you know, at whatever time it was last night, that's the moment he became, in my head anyway, for what it's worth, Ireland's greatest sportsperson. Because he, I mean, he backed up something. I mean... Ciarán just said it there.
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Chapter 8: How does the podcast reflect on the future of Rory McIlroy in golf?
And I know he has this Holden one on Saturday and his piece of Masters history is the first guy to make Holden one at separate Masters. And he'll get a bit of crystal and a few quid for that. I don't think he'll be deriving much joy from it this morning.
Well, that term scar tissue, we always heard and associated with McElroy at the Masters. Michael, I mean, Larry has plenty of that now.
Absolutely. And I mean, it was a poignant moment, you know, when you're watching after McIlroy leaves the 18th Green and he meets his family and friends and various other people involved in the operation and there's hugs and all the rest of it comes to the very end and there is Shane Lowry.
And even like McIlroy's face changes when he sees Shane because, you know, compared to last year, this is different, you know. And, you know, again, Rory knows exactly how he's feeling. He was there for...
final day of the Masters shot in 80 you know he knows so I mean again I suppose in a weird way it kind of speaks to the sheer breadth of McIlroy's experience that he can draw on that he even knows what it's like to shoot 80 on the final day of a Masters and you know look it's a it's a really really hard one for Shane Lowry to take and I guess I mentioned before he is probably one of many golfers
from yesterday that would look at that final round and go, if I could have just got it together, I could have had a chance.
Yeah, wasn't the beat, but good news, I think. Good news net from the Masters. Listen, great stuff, Gavin. Thanks so much. Great pieces on the 42 people can read from you there. And of course, Michael, brilliant stuff there. Thanks a million. Going to a playoff. Now driving, Roy McIlroy.
Yeah, today was difficult. I was really nervous on the first goal.
Do it today. Right of his line yesterday. Is it going to clear it? No. Just a little too safe.
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