Rory McIlroy is ready to complete the career Grand Slam at the Masters

Rory McIlroy overcame a star-studded field at TPC Sawgrass to win THE PLAYERS Championship last weekend. Despite massive scrutiny and onlookers wondering if he could “close”, he’s now ready to exorcise his final career demon and take on the Masters.

Rory McIlroy has been one of the brightest stars of the 2019 PGA TOUR season, but you wouldn’t have necessarily known that to listen to his critics a week ago. For weeks, all you heard were questions that, somehow, doubted McIlroy’s killer instinct.

I mean, I kind of get it. All he had done in 2019 was make five consecutive starts, each time finishing inside the top ten. His worst finish was the week before THE PLAYERS, where he finished the Arnold Palmer Invitational – hold your breath – tied for sixth. Sure, four straight top-five finishes are good, but what have you done for me lately, right?

Seriously, though, when you think about that, it sounds a little bit insane, doesn’t it? People were actively questioning why Rory McIlroy couldn’t “finish” a golf tournament. The reality, of course, is quite simple. The talent level on the PGA TOUR today is through the roof. It’s just really freakin’ hard to win out there. Putting yourself that close, that many times, is a remarkable achievement on its own.

Fast forward to today, and suddenly those doubters seem shortsighted in their previous judgments. The fact that McIlroy won THE PLAYERS isn’t so much the story to me as how he did it. Rory didn’t play overly safe golf, even when he could. He attacked to the very end, with perhaps no hole more definitive than the 18th on Sunday.

McIlroy took driver on the dogleg left par-4 and, with water threatening down the left, striped a smooth baby draw right down the middle. Then, when simply going for the middle of the green would suffice to make par and go home the champion, McIlroy took an incredibly aggressive line, drawing his approach shot directly over the pin. The rest, as they say, was academic.

Maybe Rory didn’t realize that both Jon Rahm and Tommy Fleetwood had sent their tee shots on No. 17 into the water, sealing their own fates before their final hole. Maybe he did, and he just didn’t care. But he chose the shot he wanted to hit, not the safe, conservative one that every talking head (including Paul Azinger) and online commentator (including, at that moment, yours truly) believed he should.

And he executed flawlessly under pressure. So long, doubters.

All this brings us to the Masters, just three weeks away. For McIlroy, Augusta National represents the one true failure of his career to date. Eight years ago, in the 2011 Masters, McIlroy entered the final round with a four-shot cushion over the rest of the field…and he completely imploded on the grandest stage of them all. An eight-over round of 80 sent him from an all-but-guaranteed green jacket, to barely finishing inside the top 15.

That one took a few years to get over, but he’s been right on the cusp for years now. In fact, McIlroy is riding a streak of five straight top-ten finishes at Augusta National. Granted, it’s difficult to predict the results in a single event from year to year, but much like his streak so far in 2019, you have to feel like it’s just a matter of time before things fall into place on Augusta’s hallowed grounds.

With the way everything has been working this year for the Ulsterman, it seems like nobody will be able to stop him. The ball-striking is too pure, the putting too smooth, the confidence too bulletproof. The Rory McIlroy we saw walking down the 18th fairway at TPC Sawgrass on Sunday wasn’t playing for a green jacket, but he might as well have been.

The numbers say that McIlroy pulling the double at THE PLAYERS and the Masters is a long shot. It was only done three times between 1987 and 2006 (the last time that THE PLAYERS was in March), and those winners were Tiger Woods, Bernhard Langer, and Phil Mickelson. Hall of Famers all, to be sure. But then again, McIlroy is headed that way, too – the only thing stopping him is his age.