What magnifies the stress is that he is trying to claim back-to-back Green Jackets with some of the most erratic driving of his career. Of the 54 players who made the cut, McIlroy is ranked first for driving distance, booming his tee shots an average of 337.3 yards. But in terms of accuracy, he is dead last, hitting just 21 of 42 possible fairways. It took him 12 attempts to land a ball in the short grass at one of the par-fives, and yet he has played them in a cumulative eight under. That is a tribute both to the ingenuity of his short game and his propensity for playing the game right on the ragged edge.
So often does he deviate via the pine straw or the rough or the bunkers, you feel like you are watching a man trying to win the Olympic downhill on ungroomed snow. It is the Augusta equivalent of the “bomb-and-gouge” philosophy with which Bryson DeChambeau won the US Open at Winged Foot in 2020, routinely bombing drives 400yd but leaving himself such short approaches that he backed himself to escape even the deepest cabbage. While Augusta lacks such penal rough, McIlroy still manages to put himself in the most infernal positions. At the 13th, he fanned his drive so far right that he had to ask the huge galleries to move. He advanced his ball no further than a patch of bare grass worn down by thousands of feet, duly sculling his next pitch shot through the back of the green.
How much longer can he contend with his radar so scrambled? Tiger Woods said after a scrambling performance at the 2009 Masters: “I fought my swing all day and just kind of Band-Aided it around.”
McIlroy’s game similarly feels as if it is being held together with medical tape. He is hitting the ball with ungodly power but seemingly little idea of where it is going, with the result that he frequently needs to make knee-trembling eight-footers for par.
Perhaps it augurs well that he is in a Sunday pairing with Young, the phlegmatic New Yorker who partnered him during his first two irresistible rounds. In a sense, though, his adversaries are immaterial. McIlroy could come under attack from any number of directions, with Justin Rose, Shane Lowry and Scottie Scheffler, the world No 1, all lurking within four of his joint lead. His most torturous battle will, as ever, be with himself.