Rory McIlroy committed to ‘keeping it fresh’ as he starts 15th PGA TOUR season

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. – Rory McIlroy will start his 15th season on the PGA TOUR at this week’s AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, and he would seem to have very little left on his to-do list, what with the 24 PGA TOUR wins and three FedExCup trophies. He is coming off his 17th victory on the DP World Tour; he won his fourth Hero Dubai Desert Classic two weeks ago, making that the tournament he’s won more than any other.

(He’s won the Wells Fargo Championship and TOUR Championship three times apiece.)

And yet McIlroy, 34, remains motivated. He has committed to playing more in the run-up to the Masters Tournament – the one major he needs for the career Grand Slam – and brought with him to Pebble Beach this week his current read, a book that speaks to his current career mindset: “Hidden Potential” by Adam Grant.

“I think I'm going into my 18th full season as a professional; basically over half of my lifetime I've been a pro golfer,” McIlroy said after playing a practice round at Pebble on Tuesday with Tommy Fleetwood, Nicolai Højgaard and Beau Hossler. “You need to keep it fresh; you need to try to keep inventing ways to motivate yourself.

“But I don't find that overly difficult,” he continued. “I think there's always things that you want to achieve and that you can get better at. Trying to have a growth mindset to goal-set and try to achieve certain things is something that I've just learned to do as my career has progressed.”

Gratitude, he added, has been a big reason for his longevity. As for goals, he has made no secret of his desire to win the Masters, and he hasn’t won any major since the 2014 PGA Championship. He also wants to lead Europe to victory at the 2025 Ryder Cup at Bethpage, New York, which would make it the first road team to win that biennial competition since Europe prevailed in 2012, the so-called “Miracle at Medinah.”

Pebble Beach is one of the most storied venues on TOUR but is not a McIlroy mainstay. He missed the cut at the 2018 AT&T, tied for ninth at the 2019 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, and hasn’t played here since. But this week’s AT&T is a Signature Event with an elite, 80-player field (as opposed to 156); no cut; 700 FedExCup points to the winner; and only two courses (Pebble, Spyglass Hill) in the rotation (no Monterey Peninsula Country Club).

For McIlroy, who is enjoying a career-best run of 10 straight top-10 finishes on TOUR (including a win at the Genesis Scottish Open last summer), it was all too good to pass up.

“It’s good to be back,” he said, even if that means some refamiliarization with the host course. “It’s a different format and having most of the best players in the world here is a really good thing for the tournament.”

He hasn’t played on TOUR, but McIlroy has been active. Fleetwood beat him at the Dubai Invitational earlier this month, as McIlroy, rusty, tied for second. He vowed to tighten things up and did so at the next week’s Dubai Desert Classic, shooting a 2-under 70 in challenging final-round conditions to win by a stroke over Adrian Meronk.

Those two weeks told McIlroy a lot about his game, he said. He was mentally sharper in his second week than he was in his first, and he also mostly fixed a right miss off the tee. The cherry on top, McIlroy added, was that in his week-two victory in Dubai, “I stood up on 17 and 18, I hit two really good tee shots when I needed to, so I got a ton of confidence from that, especially with the sort of feeling that I had in my swing.”

Now, in his third start of the new year, the biggest question mark is the weather, with rain in the forecast on and off for the remainder of the week. McIlroy can’t control that, but he can keep setting goals, and at No. 2 in the Official World Golf Ranking, he can keep savoring his life at the top.

As for goal setting, he held up four fingers and smiled for the cameras after winning in Dubai. The number matters because it’s a scene we could very easily see again in August. McIlroy is the only player with three FedExCup titles, and it’s hardly a stretch to imagine him posing for photographers at East Lake in Atlanta, those same four fingers extended, smiling broadly. There may very well be some “hidden potential” in there yet.