When 19-year-old Rory McIlroy won his first Dubai Desert Classic, he started the tournament in a group alongside Mark O’Meara. Cameron Young, who played alongside Rory this Sunday for Rory’s fourth victory at the tournament, would have been a 13-year-old boy coming up on the streets of the Bronx.

Young is now 28. O’Meara is 67. Rory won Dubai Classics playing with both of them.

McIlroy is 34, and he’s shown minimal signs of fading from the very top of the game, opening this year with a runner-up and a win across his first two starts. That’s 15 years of elite play — with some lulls, sure, but relatively benign ones given the average volatility over that timespan — and who knows how many more years of elite play to come. He is probably a better golfer right now than he’s ever been.

 

Young, an absolute stud, was done and dusted by the front nine. (His pace of play alongside McIlroy, though, certainly helped make for delightful morning coffee golf here in the States.)

Sunday was not McIlroy’s best golf. The back nine was a pillow fight, with Rory battling a left miss off the tee. A minor challenge from Adrian Meronk made things interesting for about twenty minutes, but the work had been done by then. Leaning on 15 years of contending in every kind of pro golf event, Rory knew what numbers the course would yield and figured his Saturday 63 and blazing Sunday front nine would allow him to run out the clock. It looked a lot different than Rory’s knuckling down to beat Pat Reed at the wire last year after a memorable week of drama.

This was a January win, without major stakes, but the Dubai event has clearly come to mean something to McIlroy. Listening to him, even though he’s won almost everything at this point, he still seems to learn from every event he enters. 15 years of that mindset combined with plenty of natural talent is how you get his start to 2024, even though without his best stuff. We will measure his career in large part by what’s done from April through July, sure. But his ability to get across the line for a win, any win, counts for a lot too. He’s been the best of his generation at that, and he’s done it for a long time now.

I’m not sure if McIlroy’s role as wartime spokesman/de facto commissioner of the PGA Tour over the past two years has drained or distracted him. That narrative has been pushed out there for sure. But I do think all the stuff outside the ropes, whether you’re on his side or not, has overshadowed the truly excellent golf he’s played the past couple of years. Between Rory the golfer and Rory the spokesman, the latter has generated the larger share of aggregation and headlines. Maybe that equation balances out this year.

This piece originally appeared in the Fried Egg Golf newsletter. Subscribe for free and receive golf news and insight every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.