You might think I’d blog about Mental Health Awareness Week (MHAW) during Mental Health Awareness Week, but it has already gained plenty of traction this year without my help. How encouraging that is to organisations like ours and, we hope, people who might be considering engaging with us but maybe need just a little more confidence before taking the first step. Mental Health Foundation (who have been leading MHAW since 2001): we salute you.
Instead, I’m going to look forward to the second men’s major of the year, the PGA Championship, which begins at Quail Hollow Club, North Carolina, today…and I’m going to do that by looking back at the first major of 2025, the Masters at Augusta National, Georgia, back in April.
Yes, yes. Full disclosure, I’m a fan who didn’t ‘have something in his eye’ when Rory McIlroy finally completed a career Grand Slam: I openly admit to welling up with joy and relief on his behalf at having fulfilled a lifelong ambition and silenced a deafening audience of doubters in the process.
[Quick summary of what said audience were doubting, for those who might need it. To win all four men’s major titles in the same season is ‘the’ Grand Slam. Just one player, Bobby Jones, has done this, back in 1930. To win them all once within a career is a ‘career’ Grand Slam, something only a further six golfers, now including Rory, have achieved. McIlroy had won each of the other three majors – one of them twice – by 2014, meaning it took a further eleven years to close out his Slam. To say that before he finally won the Masters in April, a lot of people were questioning whether his nerve would ever hold at Augusta, is an understatement: it’s all anyone with an interest in the sport wanted to talk about.]
Anyhow: two things happened shortly after Rory was presented with his green jacket.
1) I WhatsApped the group of friends who had also stayed up long past bedtime. I had a theory: Rory could now go on a tear and win several more majors in the coming years.
2) Barely a minute later, one of the Sky TV commentators (I think it may have been Dame Laura Davies: feel free to put me right in the Comments section) said the same thing.
The logic behind this nugget? With the Grand Slam complete, the pressure would now be off him. He could just enjoy his golf and never worry about winning another major in his life, something which could very feasibly translate into the type of relaxed, confident play that can win tournaments. Hardly visionary, but reasonable enough…until the idea spread. And spread further.
Fast-forward to the buildup to this weekend and during their Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon preview shows, CBS Sports’ presenting teams spoke of little other than the chances of a ‘relaxed Rory’ winning major number six. On my commute this morning, just hours before the first group would tee it up at Quail Hollow, I listened to an interview with an author who has recently published his biography of McIlroy (no free plug yet: I haven’t read it). He pictured Rory, with ‘the monkey off his back’, possibly winning not just the PGA but also July’s Open Championship at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland, a course where, for good measure, he has ‘some serious unfinished business’ (he failed to make the cut the last time the Open was held there, in 2019).
Where did that monkey go? Ah yes: straight back where it came from. In barely a month, by supposedly taking the pressure off Rory, we’ve piled it on him again.
There is a little underlying context here. He was playing well, and already looked very capable of a standout season, before the Masters. He’s enjoyed success at Quail Hollow in the past. And journalists must write, pundits have to say something, and it’s an undeniably exciting concept. I certainly wouldn’t mind watching him win a couple more of the biggies.
However, I still can’t help but be annoyed at the irony.
Maybe it’s the parallels I see with opening up about mental health challenges: the fear that admitting you’re struggling will translate, in some peoples’ minds, into the belief you’re now automatically ‘getting better’, and will complete this journey within an arbitrary timescale. This can and does happen, and it can be very damaging to feel one form of pressure immediately replaced by another.
Or maybe it’s just the Rory fan in me, who’d like to see his historic achievement celebrated a little while longer before expectations get daft again.
I suspect it’s a bit of both.
Anyway: enjoy the PGA. Who are you picking?
About the author:
Husband, father, IT Security guy, mental health advocate, golfer, dog owner. And now blogger, by the looks of it.