Holywood's most famous son is the new darling of golf, as much for his charm and modesty as his precocious talent, says Jim White.
Rory McIlroy, aged nine, on his local golf course
nine-year-old boy playing on his home course at Holywood, just under the flight path to Belfast airport.
Looking at the film of the little golfer, standing barely taller than his clubs, it is clear that some things have not changed in the dozen years since. Even then, he was in possession of the perfect swing, a gorgeous amalgam of art and function, a thing of such simplicity and grace it is enough to make the average weekend hacker weep at their own hopelessness.
And when he was asked about his recent victory in the World Under-10s Championship, the boy exhibited exactly the same smiling self-deprecation he did on tearing up the records in Maryland over the weekend: "Yeah," he said, "it was nice".
The only thing that appeared different was that back then he had a close-cropped haircut. Of the Harpo Marx curls falling in an unruly tumble from beneath his cap, there was no sign. This is the thing about Rory McIlroy: whatever the seismic scale of his achievements, the 22-year-old Northern Irishman remains seemingly unchanged, essentially still the little boy who melted the hearts of everyone who came into contact with him on the junior circuit.
And how they are falling for him now in America. There the lad has been adopted as Wee-Mac and is being feted like few before. They love his insouciance and his charm; in a sporting world defined by carefully manufactured heroes (some of whom, in the case of Tiger Woods, turn out to have been constructed on falsehood), they love his natural, unaffected ease.
But most of all, they love him because he is a winner. A winner, moreover, who overcame the bitter disappointment of blowing victory at the US Masters just two months ago, through the jovially disingenuous approach of dismissing it as "one of those things".
So how did it happen? How did the UK, which is not renowned for its production of prodigies, come up with such an extraordinary sporting talent, now being spoken of as having the potential to become the finest of all time, even greater than Tiger Woods?
His emergence is particularly surprising since he appears to have managed it largely on his own, learning the game on a course in suburban Belfast unencumbered by expensive coaches or psycho-babble-spouting swing gurus or mobile-phone juggling agents.
The start of Wimbledon fortnight, showpiece of a sport in which we have spent £250 million in five years in the vain pursuit of unearthing a British contender, is as good a time as any to examine the McIlroy formula.
In a sense, McIlroy was born to swing. His dad, Gerry, was the barman at the Holywood course's nineteenth hole, and Rory was there from the age of two, picking up a club and seeing what he could do. Interestingly, Gerry never pushed him. Unlike Tiger's dad Earl, or Richard, the Williams sisters' pop, or Anthony Hamilton, father of Lewis, there was no early sense of the parental desire to lead a champion's life vicariously.
McIlroy was never shoved on by aggressively demanding folks; he says he was the one who forced his dad out on his days off to give him an opponent. He was the one who set up a little range in the family kitchen, where he could practise chipping into the opened washing machine. As soon as he was old enough, he was out on the course on his own. He has always been someone, he says, who relishes his own company.
Sure, he put in the 10,000 hours of practice as a child that it's reckoned are necessary to become a winner. But the important thing was that he immediately displayed the aptitude, winning every junior title at an age not even the uber-prodigy Woods had matched. As the Lawn Tennis Association will be demonstrating on a daily basis at Wimbledon, without talent, no amount of hot-housing will produce a champion.
McIlroy, too, had from the start the natural resources to cope with this most mentally demanding game, never letting the stress of singular combat diminish him. He has never been lonely on the course, not with himself for company. Nor has he ever been remotely fearful of reputation or occasion.
He was obsessed by the game from the moment he picked up a club. He described himself as a youngster as being "a Woods anorak", who studied the former world number one's career with forensic detail, analysing precisely what the American had done to become a champion (though probably not his approach to married life). School work never had such a tenacious grip on his attention. The only use he had for maths was to work out his handicap, while he spent most English lessons at Sullivan Upper School practising his autograph.
From the outset, he knew that he was gifted, destined, marked. There is a difference, as Rafael Nadal has long shown, between arrogance and certainty. McIlroy always knew he would make it to the select group of UK major winners – it was just a matter of time.
And he needed no prop to rely on to get there; when he first made it to the circuit, he used his dad as his caddie, but he fired the old man when he was 17. He says he didn't want their personal relationship to be frayed by the pressures of competition. Even the apparently preternaturally composed McIlroy can sometimes, it seems, lose it in private.
Now he has arrived, his elevation has been hugely welcomed by the golfing world. This was a business damaged by the priapic self-destruction of Woods. That the game's one practitioner whose reach extended beyond the 18th hole was exposed as morally suspect was a blow from which many thought golf would not recover.
Until this weekend, Woods's presence was still reckoned by many to be essential to sell the sport, even with his tarnished reputation. Now it has another global superstar. And this one displays none of the aggressively marketed edges that always made Woods a less than convincing cheerleader.
This is the difference between McIlroy and other modern sporting heroes: he remains himself. He has had none of his charm excised by the corporate machine, in the manner of Lewis Hamilton; none of his boyish edges smothered, like Wayne Rooney; none of his natural character hidden, like Andy Murray.
And counter-intuitively, in a world awash with image consultants and media advisers, that makes him an even bigger draw. When he spurned the traditional demand on the US Open champion of an appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman, preferring to head straight back home to Holywood to celebrate with friends and family, he will have done nothing to still the rush of corporations anxious to attach themselves to his growing celebrity.
Hitching the corporate flag to McIlroy would be money well spent; that he has overnight put himself in a position to become the biggest name in sport was demonstrated at Wimbledon yesterday afternoon, when the first question Rafael Nadal was asked after winning his match was about McIlroy's US Open performance. "In my opinion he played a perfect round of golf," said Nadal. "Rory is perfect."
Every paper chimed with Nadal. Glory Rory Hallelujah yelled the headlines. McIlroy has arrived: he is now just a first name. And, as he heads back to the shores of Belfast Lough to a homecoming that may well turn liquid at the bar of the Holywood Club, where he is still a playing member, the most impressive thing about him is that he will hardly notice.
