AUGUSTA, Ga. — Admit it: You thought the Masters was over Friday night.
Maybe somewhere in that tortured golf brain of his, Rory McIlroy did, too.
On Saturday, Augusta National set the record straight. Even for a defending champion who thought he had started to figure this place out, there are no free rides to a green jacket.
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If McIlroy is going to win his sixth major championship and become just the fourth player to go back-to-back at the Masters, it will be a both-hands-on-the-wheel experience with black ice, broken windshield wipers and a busted tail light.
Just as it should be.
For McIlroy, a six-stroke lead with 36 holes to go was either going to produce history or infamy. Now tied with Cameron Young starting the final round — with nine more within five of the lead — we’ll find out which one it is Sunday evening.
Did you think this one would be different?
C’mon now, this is Rory McIlroy we’re talking about.
A guy who couldn’t close out a major championship for 11 years despite more opportunities than most pros will ever have in their lives. A guy who led by four on Sunday last year walking off the 11th hole only to be tied for the lead by the time he reached the 15th fairway.
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All that talk about how winning last year lifted the burden, freed him up and opened the floodgates to infinity majors? It ignored what has been right in front of our eyes for his entire career: That competitive quality great closers have — killer instinct, cold blood, whatever you want to call it — has not been gifted to McIlroy.
Tiger Woods made his opponents shrink. Brooks Koepka overpowered them. Even Scottie Scheffler, when he gets on top in a major championship, feels like he can simply out-steady them.
McIlroy, arguably one of the seven or eight most talented people to ever hold a golf club, is at his core a thinker. In a sport where you spend 4 ½ hours outside and maybe two minutes actually swinging a club, that’s probably part of his problem.
If McIlroy had what those other champions have, he’d have racked up at least 10 majors by now and we’d all be talking about whether he can catch Jack Nicklaus’ 18. After Saturday, we should be well past the point of thinking his presence on top of a leaderboard is so intimidating to the field that he can cruise home when he cares this much about a tournament.
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“That’s not me,” he said after Friday’s 7-under 65 that spotted him an historic lead heading into the weekend. “That’s not what I want to do.”
McIlroy is still, of course, carving out one of the greatest careers ever. If he wins his sixth major Sunday, it will tie him with Lee Trevino, Nick Faldo and Phil Mickelson. Only Woods, Faldo and Nicklaus have won consecutive Masters.
And in a sense, the fact that McIlroy won’t get to promenade through a Masters Sunday only makes it more compelling if he holds on. The fact that McIlroy, despite all the demons, has won and can still win again despite blowing a six-stroke lead is what separates him from Greg Norman.
Whereas Norman couldn’t stop the spiral in the midst of that meltdown in the final round in 1996, at least McIlroy managed to birdie No. 14 and No. 15 on Saturday after losing the lead to Young — just like last year when he briefly gave it up to Justin Rose.
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As much as you can see the frailty at times, he has real grit in there.
But there’s no question the stakes are sky high Sunday. Nobody can take McIlroy’s 2025 Masters and career Grand Slam away from him. But If he loses this one after building the largest 36-hole lead in the history of the event, the grace he’s been given over the last 12 months for a long history of Sunday trainwrecks will be over.
Maybe that’s not totally fair. Even as McIlroy roared to 12-under through 36 holes, there was a little smoke and mirrors in that score given some of the places he was scrambling from off the tee. Over the first two days, he had birdied seven of eight par-5s despite hitting the fairway on exactly none of those holes.
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At some point, that comes back to bite you — especially at Augusta.
Now, to win Sunday, McIlroy is going to need his best stuff. Maybe he’ll have it, maybe he won’t. Either way, he’s going to make it thrilling.
Even with a six-shot lead that’s now long in the rear-view, we shouldn’t have expected anything else.