ONE of the most startling moments during Rory Mcllroy’s romp to victory at last Sunday’s USPGA came when CBS flashed up a graphic showing the relative ages of himself and Tiger Woods when they won their second majors.
At 23 years and three months, the man from Holywood is younger than Woods was when he won the 1999 tournament in that epic duel with Sergio Garcia.
As they spoke over this statistic, the television commentators, including Nick Faldo and David Feherty, gushed about Mcllroy’s potential and what he may yet achieve over. This set the mood for much of what followed.
“After Rory won at Congressional, Padraig Harrington predicted that Jack’s major record wasn’t safe,” said Mark Godich, a senior editor at Sports Illustrated magazine.
“When Rory went AWOL, some wondered when he’d win another. Now he joins Jack, Seve and Tiger as the only multiple major winners under the age of 25. Harrington was talking again on Sunday about how Jack’s record of 18 is in reach.
“Is it time to take Padraig seriously? Look into your crystal ball and predict where McIlroy will finish. Alongside Mickelson’s four majors? Hogan’s nine? Tiger’s 14? Jack’s 18?”
This is where Mcllroy is now. This is who the Americans are comparing him to. For those of us based here during the Tiger years, it’s fascinating to see a Northern Irishman being talked about like this because if you go back a decade or so, the American golf community used to be obsessed with finding the next Woods. Every time a young player evinced any sort of promise at all he was tagged with that unfortunate moniker.
The wisest thing I read about the quest for a Woods’ successor came during the magical summer of 2000 when somebody pointed out that if there was such a player he was most likely a kid who was years away from turning professional. Well, back when Woods was ripping up the record books at Pebble Beach and St Andrew’s, Mcllroy had just turned 11. And, like it or not, he has now inherited Woods’ mantle as ‘the king of golf’, a term used by one more than journalist across the world in the past few days.
The most impressive feature of this second major may have been that it came after Mcllroy has made the awkward leap from golfer to celebrity.
Due largely to his relationship with Caroline Wozniacki, his life has changed more in the past 12 months than at any previous point yet there he was last Sunday, coasting to victory against the strongest field of any of the big four events.
Inevitably, their victories within a few days of each other have linked Mcllroy and Katie Taylor in the public imagination. The fascinating thing is that she is now going to have face many of the same challenges he’s met over the past year.
As a household name and an instantly recognisable face in a very small country, Taylor may find fame to be as tough an opponent as anybody she’s ever met in the ring. Unlike Mcllroy, she hasn’t gone looking for this type of notoriety either with a celebrity partner. More than one person in her orbit reckons this may be the part of her success she finds most difficult to deal with.
When you become a national icon in Ireland, everybody wants a piece of you and many people think they have a right to your privacy. Ask Roy Keane and Brian O’Driscoll.
These days, sporting success brings a lot of unwanted and unwarranted attention. Her boxing colleague Kenny Egan was nearly consumed by this stuff after he returned from Beijing. Taylor is quite a different person to Egan, a tee-totaller with strong religious convictions for starters, but she’s more famous now than he ever was.
There’s another cloud on her horizon too. What now? For all the fanciful newspaper tattle about a possible career with Arsenal ladies (she has the raw talent but has been a long time away from the game), her future is a lot less clear-cut than her past. Everything she’s done this past few years was targeted towards London.
Where does she go from here? It may be churlish to point out women’s boxing was a ‘minority’ minority sport at this Olympics. Four years from now, it will be something completely different as other nations put programmes into place to produce competitive female fighters. Taylor will not arrive at Rio and be told she needs to win one fight to be guaranteed a bronze. If she stays in the amateur game, the quality of opponents is going to improve and, after so many years on the road, can she get much better?
The idea that Taylor can turn pro and move to America to cash in on her celebrity is misguided and ill-informed too. Firstly, boxing is dead in this country or at least on life-support with the plug to be pulled as soon as Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao retire. None of Taylor’s fights were shown live over here and Teddy Atlas, NBC’s boxing pundit, stated quite baldly that she didn’t win the third round against the Russian in the final and was the beneficiary of some dodgy judging because she’s the face of women’s boxing.
Secondly, women’s boxing is not lucrative, has never been taken seriously by the sporting world and is really no more than a sideshow. For a woman who has carried herself with such dignity and class on her way to the Olympics, especially when a rather over-confident Irish public just expected her to turn up to win gold, becoming a carnival act in casinos across America may not be an appetising prospect.
While it seems Mcllroy is now set to be a major contender four times a year for the next decade or so, the only thing we can say for certain about Taylor is her life as she knew it is gone and the future is quite uncertain.
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