McIlroy vows to "block out the noise" in Masters bid

Rory McIlroy of Northern Ireland speaks to members of the media in a pre-event press conference prior to the Masters at Augusta National Golf Club, Tuesday, April 08, 2025.

Rory McIlroy insists he must block out “the noise” surrounding his bid for the career Grand Slam. and chase “a feeling” rather than a place in the history books this week.

The Co Down man is making his 17th Masters appearance but while it’s also his 11th attempt to become just the sixth man to win all four Majors, he’s looking to follow Dr Bob Rotella’s advice and put himself at risk of having his heart broken again.

Rather than focussing on results, McIlroy said he’s simply chasing a mood on the course that the mental coach has recently described as playing with the freewheeling abandon of a kid.

“We talk about trying to chase a feeling on the golf course,” McIlroy said. “Like if you're on the golf course, what way do you want to feel when you're playing golf?

“It's not something I obviously just do here, but I do every week that I compete.

“If I can chase that feeling and make that the important thing, then hopefully the golf will take care of itself.”

The pressure to complete the Grand Slam remains but McIlroy insists he can’t allow that to cloud his thinking as he comes into the Masters in red-hot form with two wins this season and three in his last seven starts worldwide.

“No,” he said when asked if he felt more pressure this year given his form. “It's just narratives. It's noise. It's just trying to block out that noise as much as possible.

“I need to treat this tournament like all the other tournaments that I play throughout the year.

“Look, I understand the narrative and the noise, and there's a lot of anticipation and buildup coming into this tournament each and every year, but I just have to keep my head down and focus on my job.”

When he won The Players for the second time on St Patrick’s Day, McIlroy revealed that he’d come to terms with having his heartbroken on the golf course and made a conscious decision several years ago to put it on the line in the Majors as much as possible.

He’s suffered since then, coming up short in The Open at St Andrews in 2020 and the last two US Opens. But he believes that risking the pain of defeat has allowed him to become a more regular contender for the Majors he craves.

“I went through my fair share of losses, criticism, expectations,” he said at Sawgrass. “I came off the golf course in LACC at the US Open in ’23 and I said, I go through 100 more of those Sundays to get my hands on another one.

“And I meant that, because that that's what you have to be willing to do. I didn't mean it literally. I don't want to go through 100 Sundays but you have to be willing to get your heart broken.

“And I think I went through a few years of my career where I wasn't willing to put myself out there. And I think that's why I probably didn't win as much as I probably could have from like 2015 to 2020 but I've I feel like I figured it out. And you know, I've been on a pretty, pretty good stretch since then.”

Asked about those comments at Augusta National, McIlroy explained that he made his decision to give the Majors his all after the 2019 season, when he was 21st in the Masters, eighth in the PGA, ninth in the US Open and missed the cut in The Open.

“I think it's a self-preservation mechanism,” he said of his fear of suffering more pain and his decision to embrace that feeling.

“It's just more of a thing where you're trying to not put 100 percent of yourself out there because of that.

“It happens in all walks of life. At a certain point in someone's life, someone doesn't want to fall in love because they don't want to get their heart broken. People, I think, instinctually as human beings we hold back sometimes because of the fear of getting hurt, whether that's a conscious decision or subconscious decision, and I think I was doing that on the golf course a little bit for a few years.

“But I think once you go through that, once you go through those heartbreaks, as I call them, or disappointments, you get to a place where you remember how it feels and you wake up the next day and you're like, yeah, life goes on, it's not as bad as I thought it was going to be.

“It's going through those times, especially in recent memory, where the last few years I've had chances to win some of the biggest golf tournaments in the world and it hasn't quite happened.

“But life moves on. You dust yourself off and you go again. I think that's why I've become a little more comfortable in laying everything out there and being somewhat vulnerable at times.”

McIlroy explained that he made a promise to himself after 2019 that he would stop treating the Majors like regular weeks and put a special emphasis on those four weeks,

“I made a commitment to myself to sort of earmark these a little bit more and to give a little bit more of myself in these weeks,”  he said of his change of attitude to the Majors, resulting in 11 top-10 finishes, including three runner-up finishes over the last five years.

“And I think if you see my major record since 2020, COVID was a bit of a weird year, but 2020 up until now compared to, say, the five years previous when I won the PGA in '14, I think you'll see a big difference in that, and that was just sitting down and reflecting at the end of 2019 thinking that I need to approach these a little bit differently again.”

Ironically, he’s turned to fiction for his pre-tournament reading this year and opted for John Grisham’s “The Reckoning.”

Time will tell if he’s ready to put that 2011 Masters heartbreak behind him and risk putting his heart on the line again, whatever pain might await.