What’s really going on with Rory McIlroy.. I really feel for Erica Stoll

He’s recently had upset both on and off the course, with a US Open collapse and marital strain – but can the golfing superstar bounce back?

How did you go bankrupt?”, one character in Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises asks another.

“Two ways,” comes the reply: “Gradually, and then suddenly.”

The slow motion drive to the edge of the cliff – the sudden, precipitous fall.

It’s how Rory McIlroy must have felt in the closing stages of the US Open at the Pinehurst No. 2 course in Northern California on June 16, when, having set himself up perfectly for his first major championship win since 2014, with just four holes left to play he missed two short putts, handing the title – and the $4.3 million winner’s purse – to his American rival Bryson DeChambeau.

McIlroy’s evident distress was understandable. He had not missed from within three feet in almost 500 attempts on the PGA Tour this year.

Bankruptcy would not appear to be an immediate threat. McIlroy is one of the wealthiest sportsmen in the world with an estimated net worth of $170 million.

He lives in a nine-bedroom, 10-bathroom mansion in Florida’s exclusive Bear’s Club gated community, which he bought for $11 million from the golfer Ernie Els. Basketball star Michael Jordan and Venus and Serena Williams are neighbours. Parked in the drive are a collection of cars, including a Ferrari F430, a Ferrari F12 and a Lamborghini Aventador.

But all of that is beside the point.

There is the unmistakable sense that losing the Open marks the abrupt culmination of a slow derailment of McIlroy’s career, a growing catalogue of missed opportunities, failure and turmoil, in both his professional and personal life.

In May, it emerged that McIlroy had filed for divorce from Erica Stoll, his wife of seven years and the mother of their three-year-old daughter Poppy.

Then, right before the US Open, he performed a volte-face, announcing that the divorce had been called off.

Erica, it was reported, was waiting at the family home as following his defeat McIlroy fled the Pinehurst course, his entourage and a Netflix crew in his wake, before his rival had even signed his scorecard, hightailing it away, as The Telegraphcolumnist Oliver Brown wrote, “so fast that you could hear the wheelspin from his courtesy car.”

It was not until the next day that McIlroy had composed himself sufficiently to post a statement on X.

“Yesterday was a tough day, probably the toughest I’ve had in my nearly 17 years as a professional golfer,” he wrote, going on to belatedly congratulate DeChambeau, “a worthy champion and exactly what professional golf needs right now. I think we can all agree on that.

But, as I always try to do, I’ll look at the positives of the week that far outweigh the negatives.”

The golfer Hale Irwin, who won three US Opens, once described golf as “the loneliest sport. You are completely alone with every conceivable opportunity to defeat yourself. Golf brings out your assets and liabilities as a person. The longer you play, the more certain you are that a man’s performance is the outward manifestation of who, in his heart, he really thinks he is.”

McIlroy has always thought he’s a winner. In 2020, in a podcast interview with Whoop, the fitness tracker brand and one of his sponsors, he said: “from the age of six, seven years old I would tell everyone I was going to be the best golfer in the world, and to be able to live that dream is pretty cool.”

The legend has it that by the time McIlroy was two his parents had given him plastic clubs and balls that he was hitting so hard they broke, and his father had to saw down a real club for him to use.

At the age of nine he was appearing on Irish television, demonstrating chipping balls into the open door of a washing-machine – having just returned from Florida, where he had won the World Junior Tournament in the under-10 division.

His parents sacrificed everything to support their son’s career. By the time McIlroy qualified for his first pro event at the age of 15, Gerry was cleaning the changing rooms at the local rugby and cricket club in addition to his bartending jobs, and Rosie was working night shifts in a factory.