The Masters and The Cheaters: Rory McIlroy, Donald Trump, and The Game Of Golf

Donald Trump is a horrible stain on the game of golf. The financial markets were in turmoil, following his announcement of bullyboy tariffs on countries across the world, even ones that are uninhabited. Some people were watching in horror as their pensions went up in smoke. Others were imagining themselves on the dole in a few months time. And what was the President of the United States doing? He was off on a jolly, playing a game of golf.

It is what he really wants to do all the time.

But the small matter of conning people comes first. And he has done that rather successfully, luring the American people into electing him as President for a second time in November 2024. Not just that: his morally bankrupt Republican Party also took the House of Congress and the Senate.

Of course, that was just the prelude. We are now over three months into his 4-year Presidential term, and – freed of any constraints – he has engaged in some of the most blatant corruption ever witnessed in what we think of as a democratic country.

It makes sense that Trump is notorious for cheating at golf. It has been said, over and over, that his need to win is so pathetically pathological that he kicks his golf balls into better positions, takes strokes that he doesn’t count, pretends the ball that went into the water is somehow right there in the middle of the fairway, claims the right to mulligans – where you re-take a shot without penalty – all the time and insists that he’s won tournaments that he never played in.

But just because Donald Trump likes it does not mean that golf is all bad. Anyone who has ever stood over a ball and taken an educated swing and seen the dimpled orb arc off into the sky blue above and land in the centre of the fairway almost three-hundred yards away will know that it can be a heady sensation, in which hand-to-eye co-ordination, concentration, balance, grip, strength, power and controlled follow-through all play a part. As a kid I used to do that thing, but it was all far too conventional, class-based and stratified back then. I walked away from it and, in the long run chose football as a sport – but the respect gained then for those who can fade, draw, slice or hook at will remains.

Those guys are good.

I know. It can be embarrassing. Hard to stomach. Especially, at a high end professional level, witnessing the exercise in sportswashing that is the Saudi-backed LIV tour take shape, as a bunch of the most cynical best players in the world decided to ignore the human rights abuses and the subjugation of women for which the Saudi Arabian elite is responsible. They bowed and grovelled and pocketed the money.

Some golfers decided to refuse the huge paydays that were being promised. And they did their best to convince those among their peers who were wavering that LIV really was a very bad idea indeed.

PINNACLE OF WORLD SPORT

Among the sensible ones was Rory McIlroy, from Hollywood, in Co. Down, who just happens to have been one of the greatest golfers of the past fifteen-plus years. McIlroy always came across as a fundamentally nice guy, with an honesty about him that was admirable. Sure, like many elite sports stars, he was living in a kind of bubble. But he wore his heart on his sleeve a lot of the time. He did interesting interviews. And boy, had he proven that he knew what he was up to once he walked onto the first tee.

It is hard to play your best golf all the time, every time. It is a relentless life, physically tiring and emotionally draining. It has at least some of the disadvantages of rock ’n’ roll, in that the tour players have to travel around from town to town, or course to course – at least until they have achieved enough success to start picking and choosing.

Rory McIlroy got to that stage relatively early. He was a precocious talent, winning his first professional tournament at the age of 19 and entering the Top 10 in the World Rankings at 20. He won his first ‘major’ – the US Open – in 2011 at the age of 21. And a year later, in 2012, he became the World No.1 – a position he has held for a cumulative 122 weeks over the intervening years.

So there are many good reasons for the respect and affection in which he is held, especially in Ireland, both North and South of the border.

The thing about most sports is that they always look easier from the sidelines. It is the basis for the perennial arrogance of the hurler on the ditch, the mouthy spectator. How could he pass the ball to a member of the opposition, miss that sitter or shank that drive so desperately? But once you step over the white line, you see that it is different out there. The opposition is quicker. The rough is longer. The wind is stronger. The pressure is more intense.

Being really good at any sport is tough work. And by common consensus – naturally brilliant as he may have been as a young fella – Rory McIlroy put the hard yards in. Within a three-year period, in his twenties, he won four majors – amassing the USPGA  twice (2012 and 2014) and the British Open (2014), on top of his US Open victory (2011).

Since then, he has remained consistently in the very top echelons of golf. He has won over 50 tournaments. He has snaffled the end-of-season USPGA FedEx Cup a record three times. But for over a decade, he had failed – how wrong that word feels! – to win another major; and in his search for the last link in what is called the “career Grand Slam” – winning the Masters, held annually in Augusta, Georgia – he had begun at times to seem desperate.  Twice in recent years he was beneath the cut-line, eliminated after 36-holes, though in 2022 a storming final round of 64 saw him finish 2nd.

The longer the wait went on, however, the harder it was to believe he could eventually – another wrong word! – do it. He developed a reputation for stumbling in the majors. It was as if he had lost his edge, or perhaps his nerve, in the really big ones. Until last week, that is.

Rory McIlroy wins the Masters

To say that the 2025 Masters was a roller-coaster ride from start to finish is like describing Mount Everest as a high mountain. McIlroy’s first round was brilliant till he dropped four shots between the 15th and 17th holes holes, to card an opening level par 72. That left him a whopping seven shots off the pace, set by Englishman Justin Rose. That was followed by two rounds of 66, to put him on top, two shots clear of Bryson DeChambeau going into the final round, with Rose now seven shots in arrears.

Opening his fourth round with a double-bogey, McIlroy embarked on a wildly oscillating trip, in which he saw off DeChambeau, only to find Justin Rose shooting back into contention. A missed putt by McIlroy on the 16th was followed by a brilliant birdie on the 17th, so he knew what he had to do standing on the final tee. A par four would be enough. But the hole was a microcosm of the round, with a great tee-shot, a flawed second into a green-side bunker, an excellent recovery and a final missed five-foot putt that you’d expect him to stick away blind-folded.

That miss looked like a disaster. How do you steel yourself after it, recover your poise and – playing the same hole – take on someone who has just shot a superb 66?

We all know what happened. No mulligan was needed. McIlroy attacked the first play-off hole gloriously, hitting his second shot to four feet from the pin. Rose missed a birdie putt. McIlroy’s aim was true. It was all over bar the crying. McIlroy folded down into a version of what is called the “Child’s Pose” in yoga and wept. And who could blame him?  The long wait was over. This was an Irishman – a product of the Irish golfing system – at the pinnacle of world sport, taking his place among the immortals of the game. And at the age of 35, he has lots of room to build further on that already towering legacy.

Thankfully, Donald Trump was nowhere to be seen.

HOLLOW AND MEANINGLESS

Donald Trump is sick, twisted, endlessly greedy and without a shred of empathy or compassion. We already knew that. And so we expected ignorance, nastiness, stupidity, bullying and aggression to be the hallmarks of his second term as President of the United States. Or at least some of us did.

But no one could have foreseen just how ugly it would get, nor how quickly.

It might seem mad to say that what Donald Trump is attempting in the United States of America and around the world, right now, is shocking – but it is, even for those of us who had figured out that he was an unscrupulous, avaricious, poisonous, immoral and vindictive would-be tyrant, with not the slightest concern for human rights, truth, justice, fairness or saving human lives, even those of innocent children.

One of the most sickening things about Trump is that there are occasions when – to justify something deeply immoral and wrong – he pretends to care about human life. It is endlessly nauseating. He identifies with Vladimir Putin. Admires him. Thinks he’s a very clever guy. Would like to emulate the control Putin exerts over Russian society in the US. Believes he can do deals with him that will enrich both.

For Trump, it is a bonus that he hates President Volodymyr Zelenskyy because he refused to dig dirt for him on Hunter Biden. And also because Zelenskyy wants Ukraine to join the EU – which he also hates and whinges about all the time.

This explains why the US President, very soon into his new term, moved to discredit Zelenskyy, by calling him a dictator. Claimed that he only had a 4% approval rating. Ambushed and upbraided him in the Oval Office, in front of TV cameras and media that had been invited in specifically for the spectacle – including one embedded Russian journalist.

All of this provided a pretext for Trump to sideline Ukraine and Europe, doing a solo run ‘negotiating’ with Russia, with the intention of handing a major win to Putin and presenting it as a fait accompli to the world. This is where it is heading.

His leaden-footed envoy to Russia, Steve Witkoff – sent for one on one talks with the dictator – fawns on Putin in public. He tells us that he is “open to a peace deal.” Well, of course he is, as long as it involves subjugating Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russia launches an attack on Sumy, on what Christians call Palm Sunday, killing 35 people. Trump excuses it as a “mistake” and goes on to accuse Zelenskyy of starting the war.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Donald Trump in the White House

Why does Mr. Trump want to do a peace deal now?

“It’s time to stop this madness,” he said back in March. “It’s time to stop the killing. It is time to end this senseless war.”

On the face of it, that might sound like a reasonable sentiment. But it is completely dishonest. Have you heard him say anything comparable about Gaza? Has he told Benjamin Netanyahu that he has to stop murdering innocent children? That he should desist from his senseless war?

It’s as plain as Rory McIlroy’s relief at winning the Masters that Trump doesn’t give a shit about the 50,000 people who have been butchered there. Nor does he give a damn about the fact that the entire place has been deliberately, systematically demolished by Israel. In fact he sees it as a money-making opportunity, inviting Netanyahu to the White Houses, smirking through their meeting together and concocting a plan to turn Gaza into a holiday resort.

The pretence at some kind of compassion is utterly hollow and meaningless. The man is a liar and a monster.

The truth is that Donald Trump has no interest whatsoever in bringing the Russian invasion of Ukraine to a just conclusion. He intends to betray Ukraine, forcing them – if he can get away with it – to cede vast swathes of territory to Russia; to accept that they can exist only as a vassal state to their imperialist neighbour; to end their quest to join the EU or NATO; and to cough up – to the United States (and Trump will take a chunk himself) – a huge motherlode of the rare earth metals used to produce weapons, wind turbines, electronics and more, along with graphite, titanium, lithium, beryllium, uranium, copper, lead, zinc, silver, cobalt and manganese. And while he’s at it, he’ll try to extract some kind of money-making arrangement from Putin too, in the land he has stolen from Ukraine.

A MAFIA STATE

That’s right. Trump is in this for the money he can extort. And while some of that might gi back to the United States of America, without a shadow of doubt, he will do deals and make insider arrangements to ensure that as much of it as possible will go to himself, his family, his backers and their billionaire buddies.

This is what he has in mind for Greenland too, his cronies – including Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, among a gang of modern-day robber barons – having already invested heavily in mining operations there.

It is also what happened with his yo-yoing on tariffs, whereby insiders – including the Trump family and Jared Kushner – have allegedly made vast profits, counted in billions, on the fluctuations in stocks and shares occasioned directly by Trump himself. THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!

Other headline policies of the administration to date include defunding the universities; taking control of cultural institutions; initiating wide-scale censorship; deporting individuals with citizenship rights; ignoring rulings from the courts; sacking people from their jobs; silencing the media; attacking the European Union; and generally establishing the basis for an autocracy.

Do I need to go on?

The US is being turned into a mafia State, with the President himself presiding over any and every kind of money-grabbing shake-down he can dream up, whether on home soil or across the world.

Aided and abetted by a coterie of hand-picked, sycophantic henchmen, dreadful ignoramuses among them, Trump has embarked on a concerted campaign to bend the world to his puerile will – to bully citizens and governments alike into subservience, force people to (as he put it) kiss his ass, rip them off, steal their mineral wealth, annexe whatever land he fixates on, collude with autocrats in carving up the world, and throw into jail anyone and everyone who protests, disagrees or tries to stand in the way.

It is time for the world to stand up to him. Threatening to crash the bond markets was a good start. Preventing US tech companies from spreading anti-democratic poison in Europe should be next. We have to act smart – and commit to being in this battle for the long haul.