Rory McIlroy’s PGA Tour year started with a triumphant walk down the 18th fairway at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, where he uttered a prescient message to caddie Harry Diamond.
“Start as you mean to go on,” McIlroy said, en route to winning that week.
McIlroy then won the Players before completing the career Grand Slam at the Masters. A period of malaise engulfed his summer before a home Open at Royal Portrush sparked a finishing flurry to a “dream” season that included an Irish Open win, an away Ryder Cup victory and a BBC Sports Personality of the Year trophy.
This year has had almost everything for McIlroy, who has had to grapple with an existential question now for months: What’s next?
That question lorded over his summer, but by the time the Open rolled around, McIlroy had seemingly found a way to enjoy a dream come true while repositioning himself for the rest of his professional career. The goal and focus for the next stage of Rory McIlroy’s career is to win the tournaments that matter at the places that matter. The rest is the rest.
Over the weekend, McIlroy won another award, taking home his third RTE Sportsperson of the Year Award and looked toward the future while acknowledging a hard truth about life after a season that had everything he wanted.
“You know, I think mentally, I have to be comfortable with maybe this is going to be my best year ever,” McIlroy told RTE after accepting the award. “Who knows? I hope it’s not, you know. I hope I still have many more great years ahead of me. But you know, no matter what I do going forward, I’m only ever going to be able to win my first Masters once. And I really enjoyed that.
“And I’ve relished the opportunity to bring the green jacket around the world and show it off. It’s been a wonderful year, but I still think that I’ve got a lot more to achieve. So I’m still ambitious.”
After a subpar performance at the U.S. Open at Oakmont, McIlroy said he was working to find a new mountain to climb. A home Open at Royal Portrush was an easy one, but there will be more to come. After checking the Masters and an away Ryder Cup off his career to-do list, one mountain looms larger than the others.
“I think at this part of my career, I’m looking for those, you know, big tournaments and massive moments,” McIlroy said. “Major championships in golf are one of those. Ryder Cups. And then, you know, obviously the Olympics. I’ve had a taste of two Olympic Games now, Tokyo and Paris, and I’ve been pretty close to getting a medal both times. So 2028 in LA I’d love to give myself another chance to get on that podium and bring a medal back to Ireland.”
As McIlroy looks toward the next phase of his career, he is drawing inspiration from the man who battled with him for the green jacket in April.
“I was really inspired by what Justin Rose did at Memphis this year,” McIlroy said at the DP World Tour Championship. “And then what he did at the Ryder Cup. And I look at what he does, you know, to play at this level at 45 years of age. I’d love to be able to say — I hopefully will be able to do the same thing in 10 years’ time.”
Rose has called this stage of his career an “Indian Summer.” He’s unsure of how long it will last, but he has carded two runner-up finishes in the last five majors, won the FedEx St. Jude in Memphis this year and was once again a key cog in a European Ryder Cup victory. Rose has poured everything into keeping his game sharp and his body healthy.
It’s easy to forget that Rory McIlroy has been doing this at this level for almost two decades. His game has had tiny ebbs and flows, but Rory McIlroy has been Rory McIlroy for almost 20 straight years. It’s an impressive feat that often gets lost in the daily discourse around golf’s current needle.
“You look at what [Novak] Djokovic is doing at Wimbledon over the last couple weeks,” McIlroy said at the Genesis Scottish Open in July, “or what some of those guys have done or what someone like a Cristiano Ronaldo is still doing at 40 years old, or Tom Brady in American football; that longevity piece is something that maybe isn’t talked about enough.
“Because once you get to a certain level, I feel like the journey on the way up is almost — it’s not — I’m not going to say it’s easy, but you have momentum and you’re riding that wave to the top. And then once you get there, yeah, it takes just as much work, if not more work, to stay there. Because I think about my career before I won this major this year, the last major I won in 2014, I had never heard of Scottie Scheffler.”
McIlroy’s goal is to keep being this Rory McIlroy for another 10 to 15 years. To do that, he knows changes are needed to stay fresh and not get beaten down by time.
“I think if I want to play another 10 years at the highest level,” McIlroy said at the DP World Tour Championship, “then, yeah, I’m gonna have to scale back my schedule so that — you know, it’s a weird one — I want to play less every year to play more into the future, you know?”
Trimming down the schedule fits with McIlroy’s vision to focus only on big tournaments, big moments, iconic courses and global golf.
After a dream year that included an existential search in the middle, McIlroy knows what’s on the horizon and has a plan for how to get there. Nothing might ever top his 2025, but McIlroy is no longer searching for what comes next. He has a clear vision for what life after a dream season looks like and, as it turns out, it’s not all that different from life before — the mountains he plans to climb are different, but the vision is no less grand.