Rory McIlroy is walking through a team room after three unrelenting days of being abused by New Yorkers: about his height, about his wife, women other than his wife, his heritage, golf tournaments he lost when it seemed impossible to do, everything. You name it, it’s been hurled at him.

For almost the entirety, he refuses to bite back (except for one outburst as he stood over a shot. “Shut the fook up.”) More than a few critics observe this is how it is in Donald Trump’s America. The President had earlier made a special appearance at the Ryder Cup, scratching the itch of his lifelong obsession with golf. As for McIlroy, it’s hard not to think even steel eventually bends under so much weight. Gracefully, he mostly withholds.

But in the quiet euphoria of Team Europe’s confines after surviving a withering United States fightback on the final day of September’s Ryder Cup, a biennial golf tournament between the 12 best golfers from Europe and the United States, McIlroy’s phone pings. It’s a message from Trump. McIlroy shows Europe captain Luke Donald and the rest of the team.

Hours later after alcohol-fuelled celebrations kick on into the night, McIlroy grabs his phone again and reverses the camera to face him. Donald (not to be mistaken for The Don) is holding the Ryder Cup with all of McIlroy’s teammates in the background. They start singing on video.

Are you watching?

Are you watching?

Are you watching, Donald Trump?

It’s a privileged person to be able to receive a text message from the President, but to then go and taunt him as well?

The clip travels around the digital world at warp speed. Trump responds on Truth Social, his favoured social media platform, a short while later: “Yes, I’m watching. Congratulations!” He showed far more grace than the crowds towards McIlroy, the little Northern Irish wizard who wields golf clubs like they’re wands, and has spent a lot of his adult life living in the same country as the people who spewed vitriol at him.

The ensuing press conference was notable for several reasons, but none moreso than McIlroy finding just the right words to describe the clowns who turned the Ryder Cup into a circus. Even a comedian who was brought into emcee below the packed grandstands at the first tee got in on the act, encouraging fans to bellow: “F— you, Rory”. She swiftly apologised and was sacked from duties for the rest of the weekend.

“Golf has the ability to unite people,” McIlroy said. “Golf teaches you very good life lessons. It teaches you etiquette. It teaches you how to play by the rules. It teaches you how to respect people. Sometimes this week, we didn’t see that.”

It’s worlds apart from just five months earlier when the entire country, nay golfing world, willed the only child to working class parents Gerry and Rosie from Holywood, just outside Belfast, to his sport’s immortality: a winner of all four majors. McIlroy is just the sixth man to do so. He achieved it in the most gripping fashion, needing a playoff to win the Masters at Augusta National, a tournament that had tortured him for 15 years.

Such was his determination to break the curse, McIlroy refused to talk to his final round playing partner and outgoing rival Bryson DeChambeau, who is also a social media phenomenon through his YouTube channel, in which he’s even filmed with Trump.

McIlroy, 36, will finish his year by returning to Australia with the green jacket, awarded to winners of the Masters, for the Australian Open at Royal Melbourne next week, a panacea for a tournament which has been on its knees.

When McIlroy slumped to the hallowed turf and wept uncontrollably as his final putt at Augusta dropped, the sporting world cried with him. You can probably count on two hands the number of modern-day sporting athletes who transcend their sport, and by saying just one name, everyone knows who you’re talking about: Jordan, Federer, Tiger, Messi, Ronaldo, Brady, Bolt.

Everyone knows of Rory. But who is the real Rory?

“For me, he’s just real,” says Australian Open head Antonia Beggs, the gun-for-hire who helped broker the deal to bring McIlroy to Melbourne for the next two years having first met him as a teenager.

“He can get angry, he can get sad. In the age of what we live in, it’s all about authenticity and that’s why he strikes a chord with people.”

Some of the people McIlroy has most struck a chord with are those you would never hear about.
Back when Beggs used to run tournaments on behalf of McIlroy’s foundation, the golfer would pump millions of dollars into charities. He had a particular fondness of raising money to help families affected by kids with cancer.

Similar to Ronald McDonald House, McIlroy opened a cancer respite centre called Daisy Lodge. There was little fanfare, no cameras. McIlroy turned up and was a shoulder to cry on.

“It was a lovely sunny day and families that have had the worst thing that could ever happen to them, he was just there talking to them,” Beggs says. “He was not making it a big deal. He was sponsored by Bose at the time and he even made sure they supplied all the sound systems in the accommodation too.”

Oprah Winfrey was the queen of talk show television, but even she can’t lay claim to one of the most ingenious ideas on the small screen.

Gerry Kelly is a name synonymous with the entertainment industry in Northern Ireland, and in the late 1990s when his show was at the peak of his powers, he’d heard through his own golfing circles of a young kid from the small country who was turning heads overseas. His name was Rory McIlroy.

In the middle of a Northern Irish summer, the evenings linger so long the sun won’t set until after 10pm. It’s a golfer’s paradise. But once the countdown to Christmas begins, the winters are one, long, dark descent where no one wants to go outside. Kelly managed to track down the parents of a young McIlroy, and asked them what does a prodigious talent like Rory do to practise during winter?

“We just have the carpet in the hallway, we open the door into the kitchen and I open the door of the washing machine and he chips into it,” Rosie told Kelly.

Kelly had an idea: he would invite a nine-year-old Rory onto his program and ask him to chip golf balls into a washing machine.

“He handled it beautifully,” Kelly tells News Corp.

“Not a nerve in his body.

“He missed the first one or two and got all the rest. I said on camera, ‘America has Tiger Woods, but we have Rory McIlroy’. Little did I think within 10 years of that appearance he would be one of the top players in the world.

“It was just a gimmick. It turned out to be the most amazing bit of sports television you’ve ever seen. And if Rory is contesting at all in any tournament, they all show it. If I had a penny for every time it was shown, I would be a very rich man.

“But I don’t own the footage unfortunately.”

And he doesn’t even know where the washing machine is, either, joking: “I want to make a film to find out where that bloody washing machine is. I’m hoping someone will sponsor it and we will tour Ireland looking for the washing machine.”

Having made his television debut at such a young age, was McIlroy destined for anything else but a life in the spotlight?

As the best golfer of his generation, it doesn’t take long to find the spots in Northern Ireland which lay claim to helping McIlroy create an incredible legacy.

On the entrance to Holywood, a sign tells you it’s the place where McIlroy grew up. His school hangs a huge picture of its former student clutching the US Open trophy. When The Open Championship, the most historic golf tournament in the world, returned to Northern Ireland and its seaside holiday hamlet of Portrush this year, grown men wrangled for autographs from McIlroy. “Gorn Rory,” they screamed after each shot. Next to him was his caddie, Harry Diamond, a childhood friend. His childhood coach, Michael Bannon, is still part of his team.

“The country is very, very proud of him,” Kelly says. “He’s given a lot of money to local charities here in Northern Ireland, he comes back when he can to watch the rugby team, he watches football.

“He’s never forgotten Northern Ireland – and Northern Ireland admire him for that.”

But his extreme profile and popularity come at a price.

He has an enduring friendship with Irish veteran golfer Shane Lowry, who he often gives rides to on his private plane, but otherwise keeps his circle very tight.

So keen is he to avoid the crowds at times, he will play lone-wolf practice rounds just after dawn before big tournaments. At Royal Portrush this year (where a 16-year-old McIlroy first broke the course record with a 61), he was out at 7am, hours before the next golfer was due to tee off in practice. The weather was typically Irish miserable and despite the forecast for it to clear later in the day, McIlroy trudges around solo as crowds snake with him through the rugged sandhills on the pristine coastline, gently kissing the North Atlantic Ocean.

By the time he wraps up on the 18th green, hordes of people are clamouring for a piece of McIlroy: small children, grown middle-aged men, grandfathers. Can you please sign this, Rory? Can we have a photo, Rory?

“He has a very fertile and inquisitive mind that is interested in all kinds of subjects – he also enjoys travelling and experiencing new cultures – but living life in a goldfish bowl as the most charismatic golfer in the world is not easy,” former European Ryder Cup captain Paul McGlinley tells News Corp.

“And as much as he has time for everybody, he has to keep his circle of friendship small and tight and family orientated.”

Publicly, McIlroy has put himself in the firing line more than ever before in recent years, the face of the establishment and the PGA Tour against the formerly Greg Norman-fronted LIV Golf, backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign fund.

LIV Golf poached Australia’s hottest golfer at the time, Cameron Smith, weeks after he denied McIlroy a fairytale The Open Championship win its 150th staging at St Andrews. It was done quietly, but as rumours swirled about Smith’s defection, McIlroy personally phoned the mulleted Queenslander to extoll the virtues of staying with the PGA Tour. He couldn’t convince Smith, who was granted multi-generational wealth overnight with the stroke of a pen.

McIlroy’s public brawling and posturing wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but he believed in a cause worth fighting for. The irony was both he and Norman did have something in common: the need to take the world’s best players to more global markets outside the United States, whose top players traditionally play insular schedules.

Golf Australia chief executive and former Cricket Australia boss James Sutherland was tens of thousands of feet in the air on a flight to Dallas when McIlroy slumped to the impeccably manicured grass of Augusta, letting out a guttural roar after his shed the burden which has followed him for most of his career.

Sutherland had been in positive talks with McIlroy’s management at the Masters all week, and thought the multi-million deal to bring McIlroy was almost done. Beggs had been wooing McIlroy’s team for months, but had yet to get a signature on the dotted line.

She first met a young McIlroy when he played the Irish Open at 16 as part of the European Tour staff. The weather was shocking all week, but McIlroy sparkled and at least gave everyone something to talk about: a new whiz kid matching it with pros two, sometimes three times his age.

“Even then he was saving tournaments without knowing it,” Beggs laughs, only half tongue in cheek.

Australia’s national championship was tortured by the COVID pandemic, which meant it was cancelled for two years.

As Golf Australia grappled with a grim financial reality, particularly with its women’s tournament, it decided to innovate and play the men and women on the same courses at the same time in different tournaments. It pleased few players, angered most, including Smith and Adam Scott who notably criticised issues such as the course set-up and the logistical nightmare of having so many players on course at any one time.

But having abandoned the dual gender format after three years and announcing the men’s tournament would return to Royal Melbourne for the first time since 1991, Golf Australia snagged McIlroy – and a circuit breaker – at a time when they needed one more than ever.

“Rory makes a huge effort every year to play a global schedule,” McGinley says, pointing to McIlroy also playing in India this year.

“He understands his role as the most compelling golfer in the world in travelling to countries far away from home. He also recognises the importance to those markets in him attending and playing.”

It won’t be the first time McIlroy has played in Australia, but it will certainly be the most important. He knows the crowd reception and the way his team will be treated will be nothing like Zoo York, and that sits just fine with him. And at the end of it all, he might even be convinced to send a message to the President to tell him how good it is.

Are you watching, Donald Trump?