TROON, Scotland – In the aftermath of his crushing loss in the U.S. Open, Rory McIlroy received messages of support from Michael Jordan and Rafael Nadal.
Tiger Woods chimed in, too.
Woods revealed Tuesday that he texted McIlroy about a week after McIlroy threw away a two-shot lead with five holes to play at Pinehurst. Most devastating to McIlroy was his 2-foot lip-out on the 16th hole, followed by a 4-foot miss on the final green that left him one shot shy of Bryson DeChambeau.
“I just sent him a nice text,” Woods said.
Unfortunately for McIlroy, he never received it – he changed his phone number two days after the U.S. Open, after receiving a torrent of texts from media members seeking comment. So, instead, McIlroy and Woods caught up earlier Tuesday at Troon, when Woods echoed similar sentiments.
“I know this is a difficult moment. We’ve all been there as champions. We all lose,” Woods said he told him. “Unfortunately, it just happened, and the raw emotion of it, it’s still there, and it’s going to be there for, I’m sure, some time. The faster he’s able to get back on the horse and get back in contention, like he did last week, the better it is for him.”
McIlroy, in his first start since Pinehurst, tied for fourth at the Scottish Open. Earlier that week, McIlroy told reporters that he began feeling “uncomfortable” over his short par putt on 16, saying that he was perhaps too aware of DeChambeau’s looming position.
Woods, too, said that he’d been in that spot before with the tournament on the line.
“Nervous, shaky, uncomfortable – yeah, all of it,” Woods said. “That’s why you love it. That’s why we practice, to build up ourselves in that one uncomfortable situation and bury it.”
Handling that situation, Woods said, comes from years, if not decades, of practice.
“I work hard at it, and I’ve done it my entire life,” he said. “I’ve worked hard to put myself there.”
Even if the circumstances were different, Woods said the most difficult loss of his career came at the 2009 PGA Championship. It remains the one and only time that he lost a major when holding the 54-hole lead, and he said it took a while for him to get over the sting of the defeat because of how many careless mistakes he made in the middle of the final round. At the height of his powers, Woods shot 75 that day at Hazeltine to lose by three to Y.E. Yang in what was one of the biggest upsets in the game’s history.
“You can’t afford to make the mistakes that I made and expect to win tournaments,” Woods said. “I know better than that.”
A month later, McIlroy now does too, no doubt.