His Name Is My Name, Too

Let’s talk names. Do you like your name? More to the point: Do you remember ever not liking your name?

Despite the compliments of people whom I assume are only trying to appease me to their own nefarious ends, it has taken me the majority of my life to like my own name. My brothers and I all have traditionally Irish names, but mine is the only one you wouldn’t readily misidentify for any other national origin. In my recollection, the one that matters in this case, nobody in South Carolina got it. No adults, anyway. More teachers than not through middle school assumed that my first name was a typo on the sheet and would ask if there was a “Cory” or, worse, the dreaded “Roy.”

Part of my distrust of and slow-burning resentment toward my own name was due to that initial imperceptibility to strangers. Naturally, though, the only people who got my name right from the start were those coming to put me in line: parents, teachers, youth group leaders, and otherwise the kind of Hidden Valley Ranch Davidians that the white Millennial recognizes instantly, like strangers who don’t want you biking too closely to their mailbox. A truth universally acknowledged: kids do not like hearing their own name from any of these people.

It was hard enough to explain – who wants to hear about the last Irish king when a plurality of Americans perceive that Ireland’s whole thing is NO ROYALTY HERE – and even worse to say out loud through the loss and regrowth of teeth and continued attempts at pointed annunciation, many of which remain today. I would kind of stumble through my name like a suddenly hungry lawnmower not quite catching to start: “RurrrrE.”

I started to anticipate when my name would come up in alphabetical order for school photo shoots, locker assignments or – hmm, maybe even at golf lessons??, raising my hand, preempting, catching somebody to correct them before the aforementioned mistakes. I didn’t want to hear my own name, but I definitely didn’t want to hear those either.

Aside from a character in a kids’ show I might have Mandela Effected myself into believing existed in the nineties, I didn’t often encounter my own name. There was a lion Beanie Baby that I had named Roary, with the a. Good enough.

Around fifth grade or so, finally, another Rory emerged: Gilmore, of the Amy Sherman-Palladino series following the eponymous Girls. With no disrespect to Ms. S-P, that was not in my television rotation at the time. Alexis Bledel’s fast-talking co-protagonist was a way into becoming a name people knew, or at least with a plurality of moms and daughters in suburban South Carolina in the mid-aughts. I probably still don’t give enough heed to having had to negotiate the gender politics around my name and its most famous exemplar at the time, and what that did to inform me about people other than myself and the much larger daily struggles they face. Still, like Marlo said: my name is my name.

Now it’s 2010. By the time I got to college, I had overcome most of the trepidation I had around my first name. People would get it, or they wouldn’t. Whatever.

By then, Rory McIlroy had tied a course record at the Old Course at St. Andrews to take a first round lead at the Open Championship. That blew up, but he’d already finished third at the PGA Championship the year prior. He was young, charismatic. He was Irish – from the North, but Catholic, and anyway Irish, because there’s only one – and the potential, we knew, was there.

Late in my freshman year, the other Rory blew his first lead at the Masters. Despite setting the record for youngest player ever to hold the lead after the first round, 54 holes in and up four strokes, he put in a disastrous final round of 80, ten shots off winner Charl Schwartzel. Hey, take it from me: what Rory hasn’t had a publicly embarrassing episode?[1]

No matter though. He bounced back at the next major, winning the U.S. Open in record-breaking fashion. Alright: this Rory was going to be the guy. The “You mean, like McIlroy?” guy. Yes! Yes, I do mean like McIlroy, already a major winner at 21. 

This Rory started doing the kinds of things that suggested a trajectory. This Rory started doing things nobody had done since Tiger. 2012: eh, another down Masters, but he won the PGA. I graduated college; he won the Open. Better yet, he closed out the year with a second consecutive major, again capturing the PGA Championship. Years after having left most of my interest in the sport behind, I was back to keeping tabs on golf. At 25, he had four majors, joining Tiger and Jack Nicklaus. Another Rory for years to come. Every win of his added household-type credibility to my own name[2].

That was 2014. His major drought would go on to extend for over a decade. In that time, plenty: a broken engagement with tennis star Caroline Wozniacki; a few more disappointing Masters finishes; a golf schism fueled by Saudi money; getting to world number 1; deciding to play for Ireland[3] in the Olympics; Ryder Cup triumphs; consistent success across FedEx Cups and Tour Championships; and, most recently, a reluctance to have to talk to the press.

The promise of double-digit majors, though, was slowly evaporating. Still, the Masters remained elusive. He finished runner-up in 2022 only to miss the cut a year later. Come any major weekend, I’d keep an eye on the leaderboard just in case he was lurking toward the top. Ah! There he is: the other Rory tying for seventh at Oak Hill.

An elevator ride of a final round in last year’s U.S. Open at Pinehurst found McIlroy erasing a three-stoke deficit and taking a two-stroke lead with four holes to play before relinquishing the lead behind some faulty putting. American Bryson DeChambeau won the Open by one stroke.

Entering this year’s Masters among the favorites, it was nevertheless an uneasy feeling to completely trust Rory McIlroy to have a dominant tournament. Sure enough, his Thursday was flat, shooting an even par and running tied for 27th. At least Rory would get his disappointment out of the way early this year.

Golf tournaments, a fading brain cell reminds me, happen over the course of four days. McIlroy played a sublime back nine on Friday to draw into a tie for third and matched that six strokes under performance on Saturday, sprinkling eagles and birdies a little more evenly between nines. Once again, it was a third round lead at a major for Rory McIlroy.

Lo and behold, DeChambeau played well enough to be the other side of McIlroy’s final round pairing on Sunday at Augusta, two strokes behind the Irishman. 

The final round played out as it did: we all know now. Bryson fell back early and finished tied for fifth. Rory got as low as -14 and swung back to -10, briefly dropping out of the overall lead following a flurry of bogey varietals on the back nine. 

At the par-5 13th hole, rounding Amen Corner and lined by Rhododendrons on Palm Sunday, he pulled his third shot just short of the green, rolling into Rae’s Creek. A double-bogey, and almost certain psychological collapse, followed. Another bogey followed on 14, and Rose took the outright lead. At this point, the cascading posts about disappointment surrounding Rory began to remind me of AP Calculus.

Two birdies on 15 and 17 – the approach that he willed to stay up on 17, I was certain, would be the shot that won the tournament – gave McIlroy the opportunity to win the Masters with a par on the final hole. Rose, his group already finished, had stayed warm on the practice course in case of an eventual playoff. A missed five-foot putt for par later, and the playoff began at the scene of the most recent crime against sanity: the 18th hole.

At this point, I left my apartment. Call it a crisis of faith, or at least another entry in an antagonistic relationship with it, but I wasn’t going to watch the other Rory fail again. And, look, nothing against Justin Rose, but: to an Englishman, no less? Where was the joy in any of that?

Out on a lovely walk, the kind I usually reserve for when the Knicks are down by 30 at halftime, the texts started rolling in: he’d done it. Rory had finally pulled it off, and we were all proud of him. The streets were alive to the sound of Rory: a joyful noise, it turns out.

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[1] Sample size of this study available upon request.

[2] Granted, the kind of people who invoke golf as their touchstone might be of the car dealership class and/or may own a collection of the worst polo shirts you’ve ever seen while making a point to order for their wives at dinner. Still: a touchstone!

[3] Who else?