Rory McIlroy has had a shocker – and I don’t just mean his golf

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At least he spoke this time. Rory McIlroy was emphatically Rory McIlroy in Canada, spinning out of the RCB Canadian Open via the missed cut guillotine, demonstrating once more how the defeats frequently match the triumphs in dimension.

There was, however, one gain in Toronto, the termination of an omerta. McIlroy had skipped media duties at the PGA Championship, later saying he was “pissed off” that news of an enforced driver change had been leaked. He insisted golfers are “well within our rights” not to speak to journalists.

The change in equipment was disruptive enough. When the news got out, it compounded an already delicate emotional picture which sent McIlroy into a tailspin of anger and frustration. Scottie Scheffler suffered the same driver fate, but none of that detail was shared with the media.

In Toronto, a week ahead of the US Open at an even more punitive Oakmont course, this truly was a shocker for McIlroy. Only four players posted higher scores than his nine-over par 149, one, David Hearn, labours outside the top 200. Two, Mark Hoffman and Wes Heffernan, are not yet worthy of a ranking.

McIlroy twice hit the ball out of bounds to register an eight on the par-4 fifth, the new driver exacerbating the issues that crowded him at the PGA Championship, where the old model notoriously failed routine inspection.

His Masters victory was supposed to be cathartic, the ad astra moment liberating him from the 11-year struggle to join the elite group to have won all four majors and setting him on a path to the stars. He never looked like contending at Quail Hollow, where the enforced driver change was received like a Samsonian haircut, and now this mortification.

McIlroy whistled up the private jet and sped back to Florida pronto to ponder not only the technical issues around the big stick, but the impact of that career-defining Masters win that, far from setting him free, appears to have denuded him of his competitive compass.

“You have this event in your life that you’ve worked towards and it happens. Sometimes, it’s hard to find the motivation to get back on the horse and go again,” McIlroy mused on his return to the media circle pre-tournament in Canada.

As McIlroy now admits, he was already bent out of competitive shape by the enormity of events at Augusta . The PGA Championship came too early in the post-euphoria cycle.

Moreover, McIlroy is prone to the cataclysmic, witness his opening quadruple bogey eight at the 2019 Open at Royal Portrush on the return of the world’s oldest major to his birth place of Northern Ireland.

And last year at The Open in Troon, the last time McIlroy failed to make a cut, he departed the scene 11 over par, a massive 18 shots adrift of eventual winner Xander Schauffele, a player he had blown away two months earlier in the final round of the Wells Fargo Championship.

The delicate thread holding his emotional state together becomes episodically stretched, dumping freak scores on his card. Contrast that with the iron psyche of world No 1 Scheffler, who has won twice and finished fourth since the Masters, including a third major title at the PGA Championship.

There was no negative reaction to his failed driver test at Quail Hollow and he will start overwhelming favourite at Oakmont next week. Meanwhile McIlroy is battling uncertainty and doubt at every turn.

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“It concerns me,” he said before boarding the plane for Florida. “You don’t want to shoot high scores like the one I did today.

“I came here obviously with a new driver, thinking that that was going to be good and solve some of the problems off the tee, but it didn’t. Obviously, going to Oakmont next week, what you need to do more than anything is hit fairways.

“Still sort of searching for the sort of missing piece off the tee. Obviously, for me, when I get that part of the game clicking, then everything falls into place. Right now, that isn’t.”

McIlroy is never less than compelling. Canada was poor but not as bad as Quail Hollow, where he badly misread the room. Few athletes have given more of themselves to the sport they grace.

McIlroy is golf, a touchstone in every way. Petulance is rarely a good look, and beating up on a generally supportive media is the biggest mistake of all.

Without the media filter via which sporting legends are skilfully curated, McIlroy would, in all likelihood, never have left Belfast. He would still have been a great player, mind, but not a rich one and certainly not the demigod he is today.