PINEHURST, N.C. — Rory McIlroy hasn’t won a major championship in a decade. It’s been a long struggle with many close calls, including two second-place finishes in the past two years alone. On Sunday, McIlroy plays in the final round of the 2024 U.S. Open with a chance to finally break through if he can turn a chance at victory into a trophy-hoisting victory.
McIlroy has an astounding 20 top 10s since winning his last major at the 2014 Valhalla PGA Championship. And while some of those have come after placing very low in Sunday’s round and working his way up from the back of the leaderboard, Rory’s closeness to winning in recent years makes his major drought especially frustrating.
McIlroy has finished tied for sixth or better in five of the past 10 majors and was runner-up in last year’s U.S. Open at Los Angeles Country Club. That’s the closest thing to the situation McIlroy will face Sunday at Pinehurst No. 2, where he will be in the penultimate group, as he was last year, and in 2023 will team up with another of golf’s top talents, Patrick Cantlay, after teaming up with Scottie Scheffler.
The goal is the same: to get under par and chase the leader, putting pressure on the final group heading into the clubhouse. McIlroy didn’t get there last year, birdieing the first hole and bogeying the 14th to finish with an even-par final-round 70 but losing by one stroke to eventual winner Wyndham Clark.
“The pros and cons of being in the last group and maybe playing in the group behind isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” McIlroy said after Saturday’s 1-under 69. “I’m in pretty much the same position I was in last year going into the final day of the LACC, so it’s a familiar position and I’ve been here so many times before. Hopefully I can play the golf I need to go further tomorrow.”
The 2011 U.S. Open was McIlroy’s first major championship, when he beat the field at Congressional Country Club as a 22-year-old, but the major tournament was not a fit for him for much of his early career. McIlroy missed the cut in five of his nine U.S. Open appearances from 2010 to 2018, and this week he expressed feelings that he didn’t have the right approach to tackle the unique challenge the USGA poses for the national championship.
A change in mindset — accepting challenges and taking a more conservative approach when necessary — has led to a much different outcome. McIlroy, who has finished in the top 10 in each of his last five U.S. Open appearances, credits the change in approach for helping him.
“Ten years into my U.S. Open career, I don’t think I’ve embraced the U.S. Open setting,” he admitted last week. “I first played in 2009, but I think playing at Pebble Beach in 2019 changed my mindset a lot. Since then, I’ve started to enjoy this style of golf a lot more, it’s very different from the golf I play every week.”
What is that style of golf? It’s about being humble about the course, playing conservatively at times, playing aggressively when you have the chance, and most importantly, knowing how to handle adversity when you have setbacks, aiming for the middle of the green, giving yourself a chance on every hole, but “getting into trouble and getting punished.”
Even in his performance so far at Pinehurst, there are lessons to be learned and areas for improvement at the end of the round: Two late bogeys (on the 15th and 17th holes) kept McIlroy out of the final group with Bryson DeChambeau, prevented him from getting within one of the leader and prevented him from maintaining a three-stroke lead going into Sunday.
To overturn those narrow results and end his decade-long major championship drought, it will be crucial that he hits the shots he needs to and finishes better when the championship is decided late Sunday. If McIlroy can excel under pressure, he will have the final piece of the puzzle to secure his elusive fifth major championship.
