How Masters champ Rory McIlroy finally learned to stop acting like a playboy: ‘Not good for his brand’
This weekend, Rory McIlroy became only the sixth man to achieve golf’s career Grand Slam — winning The Masters Tournament in addition to the PGA Championship, US Open and British Open.
It was a wild, hard-won victory that ended with him collapsing to his knees and sobbing.
Can you blame him?
After all, the 35-year-old old golfer pulled it off in front of an ex-fiancée (tennis pro Caroline Wozniacki), a villainous rival ready to bait him (Bryson DeChambeau), the wife he nearly divorced last year (Erica Stoll) — and the woman he was linked to during their split (CBS reporter Amanda Balionis).
That kind of pressure-cooker environment might have driven someone else straight into the rough.
“There is something extraordinary about this, but Rory seems to play his best golf when he’s in the middle of personal struggles,” Timothy Gay, author of the biography “Rory Land: The Up-and-Down World of Golf’s Global Icon,” told The Post.
McIlroy’s rollercoaster began last May, on the eve of the PGA Championship, with the shocking announcement that he had filed for divorce from Stoll — his wife of seven years and mother of their four-year-old daughter, Poppy — and called the marriage “irretrievably broken.”
“A point of contention in Rory’s marriage with Erica was that Erica was lonely in their marriage,” a source told Us Weekly at the time of the split. “Rory was a hard person to be married to.”
Shortly after the announcement of divorce, McIlroy, who hails from Holywood, Northern Ireland, was seen practicing without his wedding band and Stoll had ditched her $650,000 engagement ring. It was reported that a prenup would allow the golfer to keep most of his $87 million fortune as well as the couple’s $22 million mansion in Jupiter, Florida.
Almost immediately, the rumor mill kicked into high gear as a flirty interview during the Wells Fargo Championship led to speculation that McIlroy was in some sort of relationship with CBS’ Balionis, who is married to high-school football coach Bryn Renner.
Neither ever commented publicly on the rumors, though there were reports that the golfer and Balionis only shared a professional relationship. McIlroy and Stoll reunited just one month after their dramatic split.
The golfer simply told the Guardian, “Thankfully, we have resolved our differences and look forward to a new beginning.”
Gay believes that “the freckle-faced kid who reminds us of the kid brother we all wish we had” may have been scared by how his personal life could damage his reputation.
“I think he now understands that it is not helpful to his brand image,” said the author.
The one thing that has stained McIlroy is his past, as Gay put it, as “a tabloid Romeo” (who even had a reported flirtation with Meghan Markle before she met Prince Harry).
After dating Wozniacki for several years, he broke off their engagement — reportedly after wedding invitations had been sent to guests — over the phone.
“I was shocked. I thought at least I would get a face-to-face or something, but there was nothing. It was a phone call, and I did not hear from him again,” Wozniacki said in 2011.
“He put out a press release and all of that so I didn’t have a choice [about keeping things private], it just got put in my face,” she added.
Before that, he allegedly dumped his high-school sweetheart to take up with Wozniacki.
“Rory ran away with Caroline. I never thought he would do this to me,” Holly Sweeney told the Irish Sunday Mirror. “It killed me — I went away to Dubai as soon as we split up so I didn’t have to look or think about it.”
Golf, for all of its upscale gentility, has certainly attracted its share of tarnished stars.
“Look at the two best golfers of the past generation-and-a-half,” Gay said, referring to Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson. “One has had all kinds of issues with prescription drugs and the other had $200 million in gambling debts.”
But, beyond his playboy ways, McIlroy is known as a good guy on and off the green — one who stood up to giant upstart LIV, defending the PGA even as other players fled for big-time Saudi money.
“If LIV Golf was the last place to play golf on Earth, I would retire. That’s how I feel about it,” he said in 2023.
He can even be nice to a fault.
“The thing about Rory is he’s such a nice guy, and when he’s asked a question, he gives such an honest answer, but sometimes that gives an edge to your competitor,” fellow Irish golfer Paul McGinley said last year. “Tiger Woods was so guarded in that instance … You’ve got to keep the foot down!”
This past weekend, though, McIlroy apparently had no trouble keeping his distance from rival Bryson Dechambeau, the Californian who has developed a reputation as a golf-world villain by getting into skirmishes with fans and on-green cameramen and stoking hot-headed arguments with players including Brooks Koepka and Patrick Cantlay.
Dechambeau, who lost Sunday’s tournament by four strokes, griped about getting the cold shoulder from McIlroy, complaining to an interviewer, “He didn’t talk to me once all day.”
“They don’t get along particularly well; but that’s true of most people [with Dechambeau],” said Gay. “He has been quite abrasive and was trying to intimidate with his puffed-out chest, like something out of ‘Gladiator.’
“There’s no rule in the decorum of golf that you have to chit chat your opponent during a match,” Gay added. “Off the course, Rory is approachable. But he was all business yesterday, and he had to be.”
“”Everyone at that level thinks Bryson is a d–k and a phony,” said a tour insider, noting that DeChambeau has goaded McIlroy in the past by “basically calling him a choker” for dropping shots and missing putts.
Still, DeChambeau eventually tweeted out congratulations to McIlroy for winning the Masters. Balionis offered praise, too, noting on Instagram that he had “solidified his legacy.”
But Stoll appeared, one observer noted to The Post, “stone-faced” after her husband’s big victory..
“Rory looks overwhelmed and clingy, while Erica’s response appears a little more polite, subdued and tempered,” a body-language expert told The Daily Mail of the couple as he rushed to embrace her following the win.
Even McIlroy acknowledged that “happiness” wasn’t the word to describe his feelings.
“There wasn’t much joy in that reaction,” McIlroy said of his collapse on the green. “It was all relief. It was a decade-plus of emotion that came out of me.”
