How'd Rory McIlroy's six-shot lead vanish? It's complicated

Rory McIlroy on Saturday evening at Augusta National's practice area.Getty Images

AUGUSTA, Ga. — The course was nearly cleared. The sun was nearly set. And Rory McIlroy was strapping on his glove, pulling a wedge from his bag and dragging a ball into position, beginning the search for a simple fix on the immaculate turf of Augusta National’s empty practice area as one question hung in the air.

Where had his six-shot lead gone?

McIlroy was just minutes removed from a question-and-answer session with a group of reporters following his third-round 73, a stall-out that left him in a share of the lead heading to Sunday’s finale. McIlroy was candid, pleasant, in fine spirits as he spoke, acknowledging that he “didn’t quite have it” on Saturday and that he’d need to do better on Sunday to have any chance to win.

But what does that mean, not to have “it,” and to let a historic margin slip? Some of McIlroy’s answers addressed specifics, like missed birdie putts at 8 and 9 or the breeze picking up at No. 11, where he made double bogey. (“It just drifted on the wind a little bit and went in the water.”)

There was also the matter of the guys in his rearview, stacking up birdies ahead of him.

“The quality of the chasing pack is obvious. There was a lot of guys that shot good scores,” he said. That included Sam Burns, who shot 68 alongside him on Saturday, and Cameron Young, who will be his final-round playing partner after shooting 65 to catch him from eight strokes behind.

Other questions and answers were posed more broadly. McIlroy’s lackluster round had disrupted the satisfying storyline that he was playing so well because he won last year’s Masters and because that win had exorcised a decade-plus of pressure and heartbreak; the story had supposed he would now be free to swashbuckle his way to another victory.

Not so fast.

“This golf course has a way of — when you’re not quite feeling it, you struggle,” he said.

You could look at McIlroy’s sour day as a failure to follow his game plan, which was to keep the pedal down and continue to play offense. But although there were a couple swings he would have liked to commit to more fully, like tee shots at 12 or 13, he said mostly he’d done well in the mindset department.

You could also look at his struggles as swing-related; he has hit just half his fairways for the week and on Saturday battled a repeated left miss with his irons. His approaches went left on the par-3 4th, on the par-3 6th, on the par-4 11th, on the par-3 12th, among others. Those misses weren’t all the same, he said; some came from uneven lies or poorly executed three-quarter swings. But they were connected to a familiar issue.

“I think for me it’s just about keeping my lower body moving. If I can just get my lower body moving through impact, then that should sort of fix it,” he said.

What makes golf so mystifying is that the mental, the physical and the situational are so intertwined. It may seem silly, but McIlroy seemed to acknowledge that, indirectly, playing under the odd pressure of a six-shot Masters lead affected the way his lower body moved in the golf swing. And there’s something to that media narrative, he added. Here’s what McIlroy said about his hopes for Sunday, hoping to depressurize:

“I’d like to think that I’ll play a little bit freer and I’ll play like I’ve already got a green jacket — which I do. Sometimes I maybe just have to remind myself of that,” he said.

And so there McIlroy was, just minutes later, hitting ball after ball into the remnants of a perfect spring evening. These ones appeared to fly effortlessly at the direction of his target, a distant yellow flag. It’s different on the range compared to the course; every golfer knows that. But it’s a good start. To play free, you need to know that you can hit it where you’re looking.

It was fitting that just one other player was left on Augusta’s practice area as McIlroy’s session continued: Brooks Koepka. He, too, had authored a disappointing day, though he’d improved it with a strong second nine. He walked off as McIlroy’s session continued; the two had a short, pleasant exchange on his way by.

Koepka, like McIlroy, has five majors, more than anyone else in the field. The two have played practice rounds together before, here and elsewhere. They chat at home in south Florida. They’re different personalities, as golfers and otherwise. But they’ve both won majors and they’ve lost them, too. They know the good thing about a Saturday night range session is that you still have a Sunday to show what you can do.

And they know it’s easier to understand the narrative once the story’s been written in full.

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