Rory McIlroy celebrates winning the 2025 Masters Tournament after the first playoff hole on the 18th green at Augusta National Golf Club. (Photo by Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)
The joy of Rory McIlroy is that he is unlike so many of the charmless androids populating professional golf, that he treats his craft with a passion and a sincerity impossible to fake.
Where US Ryder Cup players strong-arm the PGA of America into paying them £370,000 each for deigning to turn up, he believes so fervently in the European cause that he ends up in tears. And where several of his former team-mates exclude themselves from future captaincy by accepting the Saudi bounty at LIV, he holds firm as the game’s moral conscience, reminding his peers that money need not be their lodestar. In a sport that can seem awash with greed and entitlement, he so often brings a reminder of its soul.