Exclusive: Read an Excerpt from Alan Shipnuck’s ‘RORY’

Relive the drama of Sunday at Augusta from the highly anticipated new biography.

Masters Sunday dawned with even more excitement than usual but also an undercurrent of dread: there would be no coming back from it if Rory McIlroy blew this one. “In the history of golf, no one has ever played with more pressure than Rory on Sunday at Augusta,” says Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee. “If Rory didn’t win this Masters, he was going to get crucified. The whole world was ready to write his obituary.” McIlroy knew it. “I was unbelievably nervous,” he said. “Knot in your stomach, didn’t really have much of an appetite all day. Tried to force food down. Your legs feel a little jellylike.”

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After McIlroy double bogied the first hole, his playing partner Bryson DeChambeau holed an eight-foot birdie putt on number two that was so pure it would have gone into a thimble. Bryson had made up three strokes in two holes, seizing the lead. The gravediggers began reaching for their shovels.

McIlroy smoked a tee shot on the short par-four third hole that looked like it would reach the putting surface, but his ball took a hard left turn just short of the green and settled in a deep swale, leaving one of the scariest pitches on the property. Somehow, some way, with his entire world caving in, McIlroy summoned a perfect shot, bouncing his ball into the hillside and trickling it to within eight feet for birdie. He called it the most important moment of the final round. Big, bad Bryson turned timid off the tee—”I could not believe he laid up,” McIlroy said—and then three-putted. When McIlroy made his uphill birdie putt, he had climbed back into the lead.

“Where that resilience comes from—it’s an interesting question,” says Bob Rotella, McIlroy’s sports psychologist. “Some people may be born with it. A lot of people aren’t. Either way, if you want to be great, you have to develop that resilience. It’s a skill just like any other.” Ben Hogan, the steely-eyed Hawk who will forever be revered for his toughness, once said, “I feel sorry for rich kids now, I really do. Because I knew tough things, and I had a tough day all my life, and I can handle tough things. They can’t.” Hogan’s father shot himself through the heart while his young son played in the next room. McIlroy was blessed with loving, supportive parents, but they had to scrape and claw to give their son every opportunity. McIlroy observed it all and has modeled their flintiness. “My dad took on three jobs; my mum worked night shifts,” he says. “They were doing what they had to do to support their son and never complained or moaned. They just got on with it.”

After a nervy par at 12, McIlroy led by four strokes with six holes to play, two of them par-5s he had been devouring all week. He had one arm in the green jacket.

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On thirteen, McIlroy laid up to left edge of the fairway, giving himself the ideal angle to a front-right pin. The creek fronting the green was barely in play, as McIlroy could play his ball deep into the green and feed it down the slope toward the hole; his dad Gerry would later joke that he had all of Georgia left of the flag. Other than tap-in putts, it was probably the easiest shot Rory faced all day… notwithstanding that the Masters was, at long last, within his grasp.

McIlroy duffed it into the creek.

Given the magnitude of the moment, the absurdity of the outcome, and the potential ramifications, you can make a case that it was the worst shot in golf history. On Sky TV, Sir Nick Faldo spoke for all of us when he blurted out, “That’s horrendous! I can’t believe it.”

A Normanesque collapse now felt like a very real possibility. The emotional stakes had reached a fever pitch. “It was a drama-tragedy playing out before our eyes, and we didn’t know if the hero was going to get murdered in the final scene or save the whole world,” says Chamblee. “Who wrote this—Stephen King? Shakespeare? Aaron Sorkin?”

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McIlroy played a sound pitch from the drop circle but missed the ensuing ten-footer, taking his second double bogey of the day and fourth of the week. At sixteen, Justin Rose made his 4.5-footer for birdie. Bang-bang, three shot swing. Twenty-nine minutes earlier, when McIlroy birdied the tenth hole, his win probability rose to 95.3 percent, as calculated by the sharpies at Data Golf. Rose’s languished at 2.8 percent. Now it was a tie ballgame. Then McIlroy bogeyed 14, the first time since lunch on Friday that he was not leading the Masters. His win probability dipped to 29.8 percent.

In their chat before the final round, Rotella had told McIlroy, “It’s supposed to be hard. It’s a game of mistakes. Can you live with those? Can you overcome them?” Rotella expands on the thought, saying, “The tendency for most players is to overreact. But even the player who wins the tournament makes a lot of mistakes across four rounds. Rory has accepted that. He won’t ever give in. He’s not afraid of making mistakes because he has developed zero doubt that he can survive them.”

On fifteen, McIlroy pulled his tee shot to the left edge of the fairway, leaving a shaggy pine branch obstructing his path to the green. But the slightly off-line drive turned out to be a blessing. His layup on thirteen had been rational, reasonable, logical, defensible. It was the well-considered play of a man trying to protect a big lead. The tentative deceleration on the ill-fated wedge shot was the same kind of defensive play that had hurt him on the opening two holes. Only when McIlroy lost his lead to DeChambeau did he play with more freedom. Now, in the fifteenth fairway, McIlroy faced a defining decision: lay up again and greatly reduce the possibility of disaster—which made all the sense in the world given that McIlroy had played the preceding four holes in +4—or go for broke with a slinging hook around the branch to one of the most fraught greens in golf. McIlroy has more than a passing interest in anatomy; he took up juggling when he discovered it is one of the few activities that engages both hemispheres of the brain simultaneously. His left brain had compelled him to lay up on thirteen. The right brain would unlock his genius. McIlroy and Rotella had discussed this topic plenty of times. Says McIlroy, “He said to me, ‘Rory, have you ever been to Disney?’ Yeah, I’ve been to Disney. ‘Did you ever get one of those caricature artists to draw your face?’ Yeah, I remember that. He said, ‘When they draw, are they looking at your face or are they looking at their hand?’ I said my face. He said, ‘Exactly, they’re not looking at their hand, telling it how to draw your face. They’re looking at their target and letting their hand do what it needs to do.’ That’s the exact same thing as golf. You need the technique. You need to drill the technique at home, on the range, whatever, but when you go and play, the less thought the better.”

McIlroy the artist had been presented the ultimate canvas. In the past, he had talked about “painting” shots around Augusta National, a lovely image for the creativity the course encourages. There would be no laying up. From 207 yards out, he made a freewheeling swing with his 7-iron. His ball rocketed past the pine limb, on line with the right edge of the greenside bunker, and then bent left toward the flag. McIlroy stalked after it.

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The ball was in the air forever. Did any sports fan anywhere take a breath while it was still in orbit? It’s not easy to track a small white ball against a cloudless sky. When McIlroy’s ball landed on the green, twenty paces from the hole but bouncing and curling to within six feet, Augusta National exploded. In the span of two holes, McIlroy had hit one of the worst shots in Masters history and now one of the best. From inexplicable to unforgettable.