LONDON — Rory McIlroy was certainly not the first female golfer to fail in the final stages of a major tournament: think of Arnold Palmer at the 1966 US Open and Greg Norman at the 1996 Masters.
But despite all the illustrious company, it’s still a pain to blow a lead. McIlroy hadn’t missed a putt within three feet all PGA Tour season, and yet, with a one-stroke lead and the U.S. Open on the line at Pinehurst No. 2 in North Carolina last month, he missed a 2-foot-6-inch par putt on the 16th hole. Then he missed a 3-foot-9-inch putt on the 18th.
However, the victory went to Bryson DeChambeau, who managed to escape from a bunker in a clever way on the last hole.
McIlroy, still trying to end his decade-long drought, could only stare despairingly at the screen in the scoring room that day, hands on hips, then trudge to his replacement car without further comment.
#Pinehurt quickly became a hashtag on social media.
“Yesterday was a tough day, probably the toughest I’ve had in my almost 17 years as a professional golfer,” McIlroy posted on X the next day.
He has since withdrawn from the Travelers Championship to regroup and is set to return this week for the Genesis Scottish Open to defend his title, before playing in the next major, the Open Championship.
How does a player recover from an experience like this, especially when in McIlroy’s case it’s not your first big breakdown? How do you move on from those missed short putts and do it right the next time?
Morris Pickens and Gio Valiante, two leading performance psychologists, have some answers. Although they don’t work with McIlroy, they have worked with professional golfers.
In short, it’s going to be a tough call, partly because McIlroy now has quite a bit of scar tissue and because it’s so hard to match the pressure you feel when you have to make a short putt to win a major.
“The closest you’ll get is when you kick a field goal to win the Super Bowl,” Pickens said in a telephone interview. “You just don’t get that opportunity very often. It doesn’t compare to kicking a ball during the regular season.”
Pickens, who has worked with great examples like Zach Johnson and Stewart Cink, said it’s important to analyze a failure thoroughly and confront it head-on rather than avoid the pain.
Pickens said he would pull up video of putts McIlroy missed in high-stress situations to see where the cracks were occurring. “It may be visible in his stroke, but it’s not a technical thing,” he said. “The cause is mental.”
The keys, he said, were for players to understand their patterns and when they were coming up. “We’re probably going to have to get the caddy involved,” Pickens said. “Because it might be that you’re talking faster or walking faster, or you’re not eating or drinking enough.”
Pickens, who wrote his doctoral thesis on wells, tries to create artificial pressure in his clients.
Pickens uses a game called Distraction, which requires his clients to block him while he yells at them and moves around them. He also has his clients hit a putt after sprints and push-ups, which he says helps them learn how to calm down and control their bodies after their heart rate has increased.
Pickens advocates two mindsets. The first is that of a firefighter who “goes into this situation to do something good, not to run out of the house because you don’t like the heat,” which is what one should adopt when approaching a putt. The second is a more robotic mindset that focuses on and articulates the physical act, which helps when it comes time to hit the putt.
McIlroy’s putting is a relative weakness compared to his long game, and he is working with the putting coach Brad Faxon, eight-time winner of the PGA Tour.
Faxon has stressed to McIlroy the importance of being instinctive and staying positive. Speaking to Gary Player for Player’s podcast in 2021, Faxon said he asked McIlroy to “write down or think about the feeling of a great putt” he hit every day.
But when McIlroy needed it most at Pinehurst, his putting deserted him, just as it did in the closing stages of the 2023 US Open, when he finished second, and the 2022 British Open, when he finished third.
“Putting is the game within the game,” said Valiante, who is also the author of “Fearless Golf” and has worked with Justin Rose and Jordan Spieth. “The problem with putting is that it’s disproportionately punishing. You can be off by a fraction and do what we saw Rory do. It’s arguably the most psychological part of the game, and putting literally lives in a different part of the brain.”
According to Valiante, the brain has evolved to emphasize traumatic experiences, which can lead to the embarrassment of missing an “easy” putt in front of millions of people.
“The brain starts to saturate the neural network with adrenaline, which is basically the equivalent of using a yellow highlighter,” he said. “If you’re out there trying to survive and something scary or dangerous happens, your survival depends on not making that mistake again. So the brain does what it’s designed to do: it learns. The problem is that’s good in evolution, but really, really bad in a game like golf.”
According to Valiante, remembering a painful memory is not only mental, but also physical.
“The heart rate goes up, the muscles tense, the pupils dilate,” he said. “The episodic memories don’t get better with time. They live in the subconscious and so the problem is that the next time Rory plays in a U.S. Open, the physiological response of his body — I’m not saying it could happen, I’m saying it will happen — is going to be extreme. And he’s going to have to fight it.”
Palmer never won another major after losing a six-stroke lead with six holes to go at the 1966 U.S. Open, nor did Norman after losing his six-stroke lead in the final round of the 1996 Masters.
But there are happier endings. In 2012, In-Kyung Kim missed a 14-inch putt that would have given her her first major victory at the Kraft Nabisco Championship. Five years later, Kim won the Women’s British Open.
“It’s a long process to get over 2012,” she said after her victory. “A lot of people helped me. Now I enjoy golf again. What it taught me is to put the same effort into every shot, even the shortest putts.”
McIlroy, who blew a four-stroke lead at the 2011 Masters with a final-round score of 80, came back that year to win the U.S. Open and went on to win three more majors before ending a decade-long drought.
He’s still in the prime of his life at 35, but he’s also experienced enough to carry a lot of baggage, some of which is now tagged ‘Pinehurst’.
“Good feedback is good feedback, but I want to emphasize that bad feedback is also good feedback,” Pickens said. “We can move forward with this. So I don’t think there’s any value in sweeping it under the rug or denying it, because you’re good enough and young enough that you probably have more opportunities at majors. So let’s do the things that hurt.”
