Inside Rory McIlroy’s 2025 Masters triumph: An excerpt from Alan Shipnuck’s new biography

Rory McIlroy’s winding path to victory at the 2025 Masters has already been told from nearly every angle, including a revealing three-part series from Golfweek’s own Adam Schupak. But in a newly released biography, "Rory: The Heartache and Triumph of Golf’s Most Human Superstar," author Alan Shipnuck steps back even further, tracing McIlroy’s story to its roots — shaped by working-class parents, steadfast loyalty and relationships that have grounded him through golf’s brightest stages and darkest moments.

As McIlroy returns to Augusta National in pursuit of the rare feat of back-to-back green jackets, Golfweek has partnered with Simon & Schuster to present an exclusive excerpt from Shipnuck’s book. The selection zeroes in on one of the most defining relationships of McIlroy’s career: his bond with longtime caddie and childhood friend Harry Diamond, and the quiet reliance McIlroy — famously the lone voice on his team — placed on that friendship in the crucible of Masters Sunday, during the final moments that sealed his long-awaited triumph.

The following is an excerpt from the book, which is available here.

The seventeenth hole at Augusta National is an artless brute featuring an awkward, uphill, semi-blind drive and a turtleback green that, with nary a tree nearby, is always bone dry and brick hard late in the day. McIlroy’s stress had manifested in his putting stroke, but he still looked reasonably confident with the longer clubs; wielding a 3-wood, he hit a high fade to the right edge of the fairway, leaving 184 yards, uphill. McIlroy pulled an 8-iron but had a moment of indecision, saying to caddie Harry Diamond that he needed a little help to get it there.

There was indeed a breath of wind, but it was off the left and not really helping. McIlroy stuck with the 8-iron and played a high draw. Well before it reached its apex, he was already begging: “Go! Aww, go. Awwww,go, go, go! Go . . . go . . . go . . .”

McIlroy’s ball carried the front bunker by maybe three yards and rolled to within two feet of the hole, another shot for the ages. Stats guru Lou Stagner crunched the numbers: the chances that the average Tour pro would hit it as close as McIlroy did from that distance on that hole were 0.37 percent. And this doesn’t factor in the crushing weight of a career Grand Slam hanging in the balance. (Throw in the 1.99 percent odds that McIlroy would hit it as tight as he did on fifteen and the 7.91 percent odds for his shot on sixteen and the likelihood that a Tour pro would produce approach shots that good on three consecutive holes was 1 in 28,700.) When McIlroy rattled in the birdie putt on seventeen, he had again wrestled back the lead from Rose. (Åberg three-putted seventeen to end his bid.) McIlroy did the hard part at eighteen, finding the narrow fairway with a baby cut. He left himself only 125 yards, a perfect little gap wedge, though he was close enough to the shoulder of the bunker that he had a slight hanging lie, with the ball below his feet.

By the end of the 2025 FedEx Cup season, McIlroy’s upgraded wedge game would place him eighth on the PGA Tour in proximity to the hole from 125 to 150 yards, his average approach shot settling at 20 feet 5 inches. With the pin cut in its usual front location on a two-tiered green, McIlroy had a big backstop to provide even more margin for error. One more decent swing (plus a careful lag putt and a tap-in) and the green jacket would be his. It was the easiest shot he’d faced since, well, the pitch on the thirteenth hole.

Years ago, when Tom Watson blew an Open Championship on the Road Hole, Dan Jenkins described his wayward approach shot as “a semishank, half-flier, out-of-control fade-slice that wanted to go to Edinburgh.” Now McIlroy produced something similar, though his ball veered toward Aiken. When it splashed in the greenside bunker, Nantz couldn’t hide his incredulity: “Oh my goodness! Wedge play has betrayed him again.” McIlroy bent over at the waist in anguish. Minutes earlier, the crowd had been deliriously chanting “Rory! Rory!” As the man himself walked up the hill to meet his fate, he was greeted by tepid applause.

Who could cheer at a time like this?

McIlroy now faced a delicate, downhill bunker shot . . . from pretty much the exact spot where he holed out during his breakthrough round on Masters Sunday in 2022. He played another beauty, to 4.5 feet, leaving himself what every boy dreams about until he grows up and has to face it: a putt to win the Masters. A month after blowing short putts on the seventieth and seventy-second holes to lose the 2024 U.S. Open, McIlroy was asked how much he still thought about those misses. His answer offered rare insight into all the scar tissue he’d built up through the years: “I still think about the short putt that I missed at Crans-sur-Sierre [Switzerland] in 2008 in a playoff. You think about all of them.”

As McIlroy waited for DeChambeau to finish off his shaky 75, Rory smacked his lips and licked his gums to no avail; the cotton-mouth wouldn’t quit. And no wonder — he had looked tentative and perhaps even a little scared with the putter on crucial misses at fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. McIlroy’s putting coach, Brad Faxon, admits to barely being able to watch his pupil on the final green. “I don’t know how the heck you prepare for a putt like that,” says Faxon. “He’s very aware of golf history and his place in it, which makes all of this a lot harder than it is for a guy who doesn’t really care and just goes out and plays. Now he’s got a downhill putt on a white-hot green, all those demons and ghosts are swirling around, the whole world is watching . . . it’s just tough. He told me later he was really nervous over the ball on the seventy-second hole. Man, I’m nervous now just talking about it!”

Apr 13, 2025; Augusta, Georgia, USA; Rory McIlroy celebrates with his caddie, Harry Diamond, after winning a playoff on the no. 18 green during the final round of the Masters Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club. Mandatory Credit: Kyle Terada-Imagn Images

As McIlroy stepped into the putt, CBS offered a diabolical chyron: for career grand slam.

McIlroy’s ball didn’t touch the hole.

All he had needed to win was to shoot even par, but he came home in 73, with only two pars on the final ten holes. Sudden death loomed with Rose.

But before that, it was Diamond’s time to shine. The caddie had become an easy punching bag during McIlroy’s long drought in the major championships. After costly misclubs coming down the stretch at Pinehurst, Diamond had been ripped publicly by Hank Haney, Tiger Woods’s old swing coach, and Smylie Kaufman, the former player turned broadcaster. McIlroy bristled at the critiques, saying, “Hank Haney has never been in that position. Smylie has been in that position once [at the 2016 Masters, when he played in the final group on Sunday and shot 81]. At the end of the day, they are not in the arena. They are not the ones hitting the shots and making the decisions. Someone said to me once, ‘If you would never take advice from these people, you would never take their criticisms, either.’ Certainly wouldn’t go to Hank Haney for advice. I love Smylie, but I think I know what I’m doing, and so does Harry . . . But just because Harry is not as vocal or loud with his words as other caddies, it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t say anything and that he doesn’t do anything. These guys that criticize, they are never there to say Harry did such a great job when I win, but they are always there to criticize when we don’t win.”

McIlroy’s ringing endorsement of Diamond was noteworthy because, says Paul McGinley, “Rory rarely gives praise to anybody around him. He has a very high sense of his value. He feels like, I’m the guy who does the donkey work out there — nobody else is allowed to take any praise off my back. I’m the guy out there firing the shots and taking the arrows, nobody else. He’s very much like Tiger in that way. The flip side of that, which I much admire about Rory, is that when it goes wrong, he never throws anybody else under the bus. You ever heard him criticize anybody around him? He has ownership of everything that he does, and nobody else is allowed to claim any of that ownership.”

'Rory,' by Alan Shipnuck, is available now.

Now, in the moments before the playoff, Diamond offered his best friend one simple thought: “Well, pal, we would have taken this on Monday morning.” McIlroy told this story to the world during his Sunday evening press conference at Augusta while lavishing praise upon Diamond. After hearing his caddie’s succinct pep talk, McIlroy says, “It was an easy reset.” That’s because he knew Diamond was right. In the preceding four and a half hours, McIlroy had stepped on his dick, shit the bed, screwed the pooch . . . and yet somehow he had vanquished DeChambeau, Åberg, Patrick Reed, Scottie Scheffler, Xander Schauffele, and sundry others. To live his childhood dream, all he had to do now was outlast the battle-scarred Rose, forty-five, whom he had been regularly beating for the last decade and a half. And oh, by the way, Rose’s career playoff record on the PGA Tour was 2-4 (including a loss to Sergio García at the 2017 Masters!) while McIlroy’s was 4-2.

Rose had the honor when the playoff commenced on the eighteenth hole, by virtue of having completed his final round first. He hit a solid drive down the right side of the fairway. For McIlroy, the chute between the trees suddenly looked that much tighter. His game will always be defined by a spectacular ability to drive the golf ball. Now, when it mattered most, McIlroy unleashed a swing of pure poetry, pounding his ball thirty-two yards past Rose’s. Playing first, Rose had the chance to apply a ton of pressure to his foe; he summoned an excellent shot that landed right next to the hole but was a little unlucky when it rolled out to twelve feet. McIlroy had the exact same distance as the last time he played the hole, 125 yards. But now he was in the dead center of the fairway, far enough away from the shoulder of the bunker to have a perfectly flat lie. McIlroy selected a gap wedge again.

This time, he played a tight draw over the flag. He carried it deeper into the green than Rose had, using the backstop to feed his ball back toward the hole. It rolled, trickled, and curled to three feet. The roar at Augusta was substantial but not quite delirious. After all that McIlroy had put the fans through, no one believed it was over yet.

Rose putted first, and he understood that he had landed in the Stewart Cink role. “I wanted to be the bad guy today,” he said. But his putt was never on line, and Rose cleared the stage. How many three-footers had Rory McIlroy made in his lifetime? Half a million? More? And yet, after all the preceding melodrama, absolutely no one would have been surprised if he missed this one. But he didn’t.

McIlroy tossed his putter over his head and collapsed onto his knees, his forehead pressed against the parched putting surface. His body heaved and shook with catharsis. He sat up, tilted his head back and roared. “There wasn’t much joy in that reaction,” he said. “It was all relief.” He rose to his feet, unsteadied by the moment, and fell into a hug with his best friend as they pounded each other on the back.

“We’ve had so many good times together,” McIlroy said. “He’s been like a big brother to me the whole way through my life. To be able to share this with him after all the close calls that we’ve had, all the crap that he’s had to take from people that don’t know anything about the game, yeah, this one is just as much his as it is mine.”

McIlroy dapped up Rose and his caddie, Mark Fulcher, both of whom were exceedingly gracious. They left the green, but McIlroy lingered. He spiked his hat to the ground, pumped his fists, and then doubled over again, shaking. Diamond came over and spoke into McIlroy’s ear and then guided him off the green, his arm around his boss’s back while Rory cried into his shoulder.

Incredible scenes.

The book, “Rory: The Heartache and Triumph of Golf’s Most Human Superstar,” by author Alan Shipnuck, is available here.

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: New Alan Shipnuck book 'Rory' on bond with caddie Harry Diamond