These are loud, harrumphing, opinionated times. Back in ye olden days, if you wanted to get your message across about one thing or the other, you’d have to scribble your grievance onto a clump of parchment with a quill under the clandestine light of a flickering candle before rolling it up, putting a beeswax seal on it and handing it to a man on a horse with the words, “hark good messenger, thou wend thy way and make haste.”
Funnily enough, this is still the archaic procedure your correspondent employs to file the Tuesday column to the sports desk.
Nowadays, of course, opinions, grumbles, grouses or groans can be relayed in an instant, whether you want to shove it on to social media, text it to the news channels or shout it down the line to a radio phone in.
Before you know it, the general bluster, braying and bravado has generated such a din, it’s the equivalent of listening to a fog horn having a disagreement with a pneumatic hammer drill and couple of angle grinders.
Everywhere you turn, there are folk wanting to make themselves heard and Rory McIlroy’s confirmation at the end of last week that he would not be playing in this summer’s Irish Open was greeted, in certain grubby corners of the Twitter trough, with the kind of unhinged, mouth-frothing claptrap and codswallop that tends to be the reserve of paranoid Rangers and Celtic fans.
One of the most jaw-dropping reactions, however, was in the old medium of print where a columnist with Ireland’s biggest selling newspaper, in a prolonged, pious sermon from the pulpit of holier-than-thou golfing devotion, described McIlroy’s no-show as, among other things, “an insult to the national intelligence.”
In an astonishing, flooery tirade, which bordered on self-parody, the writer suggested that McIlroy’s decision “speaks to the wider public as just the latest mystifying and infuriating lunge from a superstar increasingly astray, a wildly wobbling champion”, while “his sense of duty has been snap-hooked out of bounds.” The message was clear; McIlroy should be tried for high treason.
Reasoned observers, of course, could easily see the lunacy of such a laughably hysterical reaction. But in this knee-jerk age of instant judgement, forced indignation, flimsy fist-shaking and whimpering, absurd moralising about anything and everything, calm reason is hardly a defining trait of the times.
The news that McIlroy will not be playing in the Irish Open was hardly, well, news anyway. He had mentioned at the tail end of 2018 that his scheduling for 2019 would see him playing the week before the majors.
In July, when the Open Championship heads to McIlroy’s own backyard of Royal Portrush, he will, all being well, tune himself up at the Scottish Open the week before.
The Irish Open, meanwhile, is held the week before the Scottish showpiece. In McIlroy’s quest for major glory, three weeks of robust links competition on the trot was too much. Something was going to be sacrificed.
READ MORE: McIlroy set for Scottish Open
In the end, the one to go was the Irish Open, an event he resuscitated so much, the trophy should actually be some decorative silver defibrillators perched on an ornate plinth.
When he took over as host in conjunction with his own Foundation back in 2015, the Irish Open was a rank-and-file event on the European Tour and in many ways was on the bones of its backside financially.
Having handed over the hosting reins to Paul McGinley, the Irish Open now boasts a purse of $7 million, is part of the circuit’s money-dripping Rolex Series and is one of the major stop offs on the tour schedule.
It won’t have its star attraction this year but it is in rude health. This is as good a time as any to let it stand on its own two feet.
As for McIlroy? Well, he can’t really win can he? He often takes withering barbs for not adding to his haul of major titles and when he adopts an approach to scheduling aimed at giving himself the best opportunity to end that drought, he still comes in for hissing criticism. ‘Twas ever thus.
Sunday’s second place finish behind runaway winner Dustin Johnson in the WGC-Mexico Championship was his fourth top-five finish in a row on the PGA Tour.
His average round score in 2019 is 68.25 and he’s not posted anything higher than a 72 in 16 rounds in the new year. The door is creaking and, while you can’t predict anything in this fickle game, you feel he will burst through and win in the very near future. “Sooner or later things can go my way,” he said with purpose.
The Irish Open owes a debt of gratitude to McIlroy for hauling it out of the wilderness. McIlroy, meanwhile, owes it to himself to get the best from his abundant talents. If that means a few petted lips from the easily offended, then so be it …
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