Chaos is Master McIlroy’s secret sauce

Most players win by calculation, like accountants plotting their way through tax returns. Rory McIlroy never had that luxury. His greatness has always arrived in bursts – wild, brilliant and just slightly unhinged.

He is not your average metronome golfer, one of those surgical assassins and obsessive tacticians. McIlroy, when he's at his very best, is a man possessed not by precision but by instinct. His game lives on the edge, allergic to the safe shot and addicted to the outrageous draw most players would dismiss as career-ending.

On Sunday afternoon at Augusta National last month, McIlroy duelled not just with the course, but with himself. He swung from safe to surreal, conservative to cavalier, often in the space of a hole. And when he committed to the bold, to the impossible drive or the suicidal long iron, it was like watching a man freed from gravity. It was the moments of hesitation and caution that almost always ended his Masters dream once again, though this time it would likely have been a fatal blow to his Grand Slam ambitions. But when he threw himself fully into the chaos – arms loose, eyes up, heart wild – he delivered one of the most electric final rounds Augusta has seen in years, and perhaps of all time.

The plot of Happy Gilmore wasn’t as ludicrous. McIlroy, older and scarred by majors of the past, won and lost and then won the green jacket once again. It was as if the game itself couldn’t quite decide whether to reward or ruin him.

Talk of a calendar Grand Slam began before the ink had even dried on his scorecard. All four majors in one year. Nobody has ever achieved it. Not even Jack Nicklaus or Tiger Woods at their respective peaks. In the modern era, with fields deeper than ever, it’s not supposed to be possible. But McIlroy has a habit of making the impossible look like a Saturday morning fourball at the local pitch and putt. And if there’s anywhere he could keep this run going, it’s at Quail Hollow this week. He’s already won there four times. The course suits him like a well-worn glove. It’s a venue where he doesn’t need to think too hard which, as it happens, is often when he’s at his most dangerous.

Still, there’s also a trap in all that comfort. Courses you know too well can trick you into easing off, into playing the sort of tidy, conservative golf that keeps you in contention but rarely wins majors. That version of McIlroy, the one who plots rather than pounces doesn't win tournaments. The Rory who matters is the one who sees a narrow gap and aims for it, who goes for the green when everyone else is laying up and who struts down the fairway with a cheeky grin knowing physicists are questioning everything they've ever studied.

To stay in the conversation and keep the calendar Grand Slam dream alive he’ll need to keep swinging like nothing’s at stake. That’s the only version of him that scares the rest of the field. And it's the only version that has even the faintest hope of doing what no one has managed in the game.

It's not entirely inconceivable.

Should the Northern Irishman triumph again this week in North Carolina, he'll move on to Oakmont Country Club for the US Open, a week that rewards both nerve and length, both of which the 36-year-old has in abundance. It’s a tournament for monster ball-strikers, for players who can find something special when the pressure closes in. McIlroy, when he’s in full flow, is still that player.

Only then comes the real madness provided McIlroy can keep the momentum going: Royal Portrush and an Open Championship in his home country. If the dream somehow stays alive through June, he will be provided with a true fairytale climax to the major season – the links, in the wind, in front of his own people. The weight of that would be immense. The noise down the fairway – and inside his own head – would be cacophonous. Because if McIlroy were to win the Open on that stage, in that context, to complete the greatest individual season in the history of the sport, the Oxford Dictionary lads would have to get working to come up with a new term to describe the feat.

But all of that – Oakmont, Portrush and further history – remains hypothetical for now. Ridiculously and gloriously hypothetical. Winning one major in a career is difficult enough in its own right. Winning four in a single year is the kind of thing that belongs in children's fantasy worlds as they practice their swings in the back garden. McIlroy knows this better than anyone. For over a decade, he played the role of the nearly man, his name mentioned with reverence but always followed by a question mark. He was golf’s greatest unfinished sentence.

So it all comes back, as it always must, to Thursday. To the first tee shot at Quail Hollow. The Rory who might actually do this isn’t the one fixated on Portrush. It’s the one who looks down the fairway, sees the riskiest line available and zones in like he’s just been dared to take it.

Because if Augusta reminded us of anything, it’s that McIlroy doesn’t thrive when he tries to manage his way through the chaos. He thrives when he runs into it like a zippy terrier let loose in a wedding marquee, high on cocktail sausages and attention. When the swing is loose, the plan – if there even is one – seems stitched together with equal parts talent and defiance.

There’ll be plenty of time for bigger questions if he wins this week. There’ll be talk shows and columns, and maybe even mutterings of a Netflix documentary. But all of that is noise. Right now, there’s only the next major. Only Quail Hollow.

The dream is still miles away. But this is how it starts. One mad swing at a time.