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A decade later it's the sound that shooting makes sticking to Arron Oberholser. "A sound that I will never forget," he said this time last year
"At that time, I had heard only one player do this sound with his irons: Tiger Woods, he just hit it so clean, so crisp. "
The sound of this nine iron is Oberholser's permanent memory of playing with Rory McIlroy at the 2007 Open at Carnoustie. McIlroy was then 18 and still an amateur. Oberholser and many other American players had never heard of him. It changed quickly enough. McIlroy shot a 68 on the first day, a better than Tiger Woods, and won the silver medal for the leading amateur at the end of the week.
Oberholser recalls the 8th where McIlroy's bullet was stuck on a steep slope just off the green. "He grabbed a lobed club, which shocked me," Oberholser said, "slipped underneath and coiled on the green and rolled it about a foot. went, "Whoa! This is not an amateur shooter: it's a shot of the best player in the world."
There are many of these old stories circulating this week on the way McIlroy played on his Open debut that year. Trevor Immelman remembers his training lap with McIlroy. "I had no idea who he was, he was a little chubby and he had a lot of hair hanging out under his cap.After 11 holes, my coach, David Leadbetter, joined our group. and he said to me, "Is this kid good?" I said, "It made me feel inferior in every possible way."
McIlroy en said he remembered playing with Padraig Harrington's son, Paddy, behind the 18th hole while Harrington was in that four-hole round with Sergio García, the boy is now 15. "C & # 39; "It's so funny to think that day," says McIlroy. "I think I saw Paddy today walking with Padraig, he's huge now." McIlroy's not a bad thing. children himself "but I hope that there is a young amateur waiting behind me for the 18th green, and I am the one who gets there and trying to win the tournament. "
McIlroy has won his last major, the PGA Valhalla, for four years now. Time is starting to make itself felt. It seems that every major McIlroy game nowadays begins with a lot of questions about why his sterile trail lasted so long and when it will end. He does not have good answers. "I'm trying," he says. "I do my best every time I play, and it just has not happened." The game can become terribly complicated if you let it. McIlroy has changed his putter six times in the last year and has changed again. No wonder he's starting to flourish for the moment everything seemed so simple.
"I like the way he looks so easy," Nick Faldo said when he watched McIlroy play in 2007. "He's lining up, sees"
C & # 39; is the McIlroy who said, when asked how he was so successful at shaping the ball: "I just think I shoot and hit, I see it in my head and then I have Gordon Faulkner stated that McIlroy was so clear in his thinking that he was "15 years ahead of what he should be with regard to the mental side of golf."
The best part of 15 years later, McIlroy, 29, says he's trying to get back into this teenage state of mind: "It was my first open championship. I was just trying to soak and I was so grateful to be here, I sometimes think that I have to go back to this attitude where I play without worries and am just happy to be here. " 1 9659014] McIlroy has enjoyed training with Jon Rahm "because the first instinct that he has is to get up on a T-shirt and pull a driver out of the bag. Do not think about boredom or think of anything. Just, "That's where I want to hit, and that's where I want to go." That's exactly what McIlroy wants to play this week. He said that he planned to use his driver here, even though the ground is so hard that his ball will surely get in trouble often. He says that he is confident that the rough is so thin that there is "five to 10 yards on either side of the fairway" where he can get away with it.
It seems imprudent. But McIlroy thinks that as he gets older he is more cautious. Which is a way of looking at it; others may call it wisdom. But he is convinced that he is holding him back. "There is something nice about being young and being unaware of certain things," McIlroy says. "I remember when we last played at The Open and, again, I was just happy to be here, I was bouncing on the fairways, I did not care if I was shooting 82 or 62. The more I could get into that state of mind, the better I would play golf. "
The danger is that he is in pursuit of something that # 39; none of us come back, our youth.
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