Rory McIlroy’s near-perfect PGA round on perfect day provided perfect escape

NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. — Let’s do an exercise in elevation here. Shall we? It’s getting near three o’clock on Saturday afternoon and here’s Rory McIlroy on 17, the last of Aronimink’s show-us-what-you-got par-3s. We’re looking down at the Masters champion, the only man in the world who can win the single-year Grand Slam in 2026. You can see the wee button on the top of his Nike baseball cap. His shirt tails are more out than in. 

Rory is at the dead center of your clock dial here, let’s just say. Viewed that way, Brooks Koepka, McIlroy’s third-round playing partner, is at 10 o’clock, having already sauntered over to the 18th tee, and for a few longish moments McIlroy is standing all alone on the 17th green, not moving, not doing anything but holding a putter and looking at the hole, seemingly lost in time and space. He had just made a bogey, a good one, all things considered. From where he was in one (fried-egg lie in a greenside trap) and two (nasty lie in lush greenside rough)? It could have been worse.

That’s the micro view of the 4 he made there. Golf loves micro. You can get lost in golf as you can get lost in a movie, or in a dream. Modern life doesn’t give you that many opportunities to get lost, with our electronic leashes and all. There’s a movie about the jazz legend Chet Baker called “Let’s Get Lost.” Maybe you’ve seen it. At some of his gigs he played through sunrise.

Let’s head north, into the blue skies of this perfect May day, here on the edge of the Main Line horse country. You can see some ripples in the pond in front of the 17th green as the wind skims along the top of it. Two days of a cool wind and a warm wind on Saturday — perfect. The nearby grandstands are packed.

Up we go and now the whole course is coming into view. It’s big and bold and hilly and features every shade of green. You can see the golfers moving through it, the parade of tournament golf. You can see the Tudor clubhouse with its red-tiled roof, 100 years old and seemingly airlifted from the English countryside. In quieter times — dusk on a quiet fall day, say — the locker room creaks as your foursome packs up and heads out. No creaking this week. Everything is buzzing. The clubhouse looks like the manor house in “Howards End,” if you know that movie.

The players, about 70 of them, are on the course. The second-round leaders are on the first hole. Jon Rahm is deep in the front nine, chasing. Elsewhere, Scottie Scheffler and Xander Schauffele and Ludvig Aberg are doing the same. Elsewhere, there’s Matti Schmid, Chris Gotterup, Maverick McNealy, doing the same. Golf thrives in this stew.

Whatever Gil Hanse and the Aronimink grounds crew did and are doing to this golf course, it’s working. You’ve been coming to this course for 40 years. It’s never looked better. All these exposed hilltops, all these windblown golfers trying to solve the puzzles of these knobby greens. It’s difficult, appropriately so. This is championship golf, the whole golf world coming together in the name of this odd pursuit that captivates so many of us. One major per month: April, May, June, July. It’s a short season. If you’re going to win the single-season Grand Slam, you gotta stay hot for 12 weeks. Rory is headlining that story, this year. It’s not impossible.

If there’s ever been a day better than this one, you can’t remember it. That’s how swept away you are by the proceedings here, here at top of funnel, peering into all of this golf.

You launch a booster rocket and now you’re above the Goodyear Blimp. There’s the Merion Golf Club and its two courses; there’s the Merion Cricket Club and its grass courts; there’s the Lower Merion High School campus and somewhere in there its gym, where Kobe launched all those 2s, his NBA dreams arcing alongside them. There are the steps of the Art Museum (“Rocky”), the train tracks into 30th Street Station (“Witness”), the wooden shingles atop Independence Hall (“1776”). Here we are, 250 years later.

Rory McIlroy, like other artists before him, can be hard to predict. He made a 5 on the par-5 16th, where he would have loved, and maybe half-expected, to make 4. He made a 4 on 17 where you’re one solid iron shot away from making a tap-in 3. Still, nice progress: 74, 67, 66. By the end of play on Saturday, he was three under for the tourney and three shots out of Alex Smalley’s lead. These leads can be frail things, as Rory McIlroy, among many others, has shown us.

He’s staying in a house near the course and is watching “The Dark Knight,” the Batman movie,at night, in pieces. The movie is two-and-a-half hours long, and it’s aptly named. On Saturday, McIlroy rolled out of bed and into all this golfing sunshine, sunshine in every sense of the word. The chaos of the world, for part of a day, anyhow, seemed far away.

“You can, you can get into a cocoon,” Rory said Saturday, hanging out for a couple minutes, in no rush, really, to go anywhere, his mood buoyant, just like everybody else. “You do that more at the Masters than anywhere else — that whole week you seem to have no idea what’s going on in the rest of the world. It’s not quite the same here, but for us, this golf tournament is the most important thing in our lives right now. You still keep up with things: Trump’s trip to China and all of that. But when you’re here at the tournament, But when we’re here at the course, I don’t want to say it’s escapism, but for us, this is it.”

Us.

Rory’s us is likely the players and maybe the caddies, some coaches, families if they’re in tow. But from on high, from 30,000 feet, you can’t tell Jon Rahm from Crew Koepka, the golfer’s son, on hand on this Saturday afternoon. Us is the whole party that is gathered here, at this splendid course, in this splendid season, on this splendid day. The golf is giving us a break here. A break and a vacation.