IT is a brutal truth, the one that stalked Rory McIlroy on every fresh journey up Magnolia Lane, reminding him that the story of a life is often most vividly revealed by the pages never written.
In the only golfing metric that truly matters to those immense figures in pursuit of something more profound than wealth beyond imagining, the one that weighs the depth and transcendence of a career in the gold standard of major championships, the biography of the great Ulsterman's past decade amounted to a blank folio.
A nothing. A void. An emptiness.
Ten barren years elapsed since the summer of 2014 when McIlroy, though he had no idea at the time, misplaced the major-winning formula on some lonesome patch of Kentucky bluegrass along the road out of Valhalla Golf Club.
Of course, there has been an abundance of stellar days in the interim: Fed-Ex Cups, 15 further PGA Tour wins, an Irish Open weekend for the ages at the K Club, timeless Ryder Cup memories, hundreds of millions of dollars accrued.
Even on the biggest weeks there have been any number of final round dashes from way off the pace including at Augusta in 2022 - to secure podium finishes.
By the standards of mortals, the 35-year-old has resided for the past decade in his chosen code's Garden of Eden.
But perspective must necessarily be a casualty when judging a generational talent: By the standards of Rory McIlroy - the same unbending set of codes that governed the professional lives of The Tiger or Jack - the decade from 2014 to 2024 was a write-off.
When he seemed perfectly positioned to end one of sport's more inexplicable famines - St Andrews in 2022, the US Open last year, offering two painful recent examples - the Holywood phenomenon was incapable of propelling himself across the line.
At the home of golf, he played conservatively and was outscored by six shots by Cam Smith; at Los Angeles Country Club, just a single birdie and 34 putts in a closing round of level par opened the door to glory for Wyndham Clark.
With each passing year, the baggage mounted and the fears piled higher that he might never again view the Promised Land upon which he once seemed to hold a lifetime lease.
More than 3,500 of his peak days as an alpha of the fairways came and went - like the water that flows under the Hogan Bridge straddling Augusta National's Rae's Creek - since McIlroy claimed his fourth major at the 2014 PGA Championship.
Even before an imperious Rory raised the storied Wanamaker trophy to the heavens on that long ago August Sunday in Louisville, no less a figure than Jack Nicklaus had talked openly of Rory eclipsing his, Nicklaus', 18 Big Ones.
By 2014 he stood alone with Woods and the Golden Bear, the only trio to have claimed four of these prized jewels before their 25th birthday. Nobody could conceive that the taps were about to run dry.
Every sport has its supreme courts, the tribunals of ultimate judgement, the ones where the unanswerable verdicts on greatness are issued.
Since the beginning of 2015, Novak Djokovic, two years Rory's senior and with his path to the mountain top for a long time blocked by two of the greatest ever to have held a racket, had accumulated 17 tennis majors.
Over the same period, Pep Guardiola, like McIlroy a sportsman dipped in the special sauce at birth, had faced down Klopp, Mourinho, Zidane and Ancelotti, to accumulate a further 17 pieces of significant football silverware.
Even those with a single rather than four pre-eminent prizes per year on offer made hay as Rory's field turned fallow: Lewis Hamilton, for example, claiming six F1 world titles since the end of 2014,
As his peers from other sports shouted out their credentials on the biggest stage, McIlroy knew only dark silences on the weeks of greatest consequence.
The torment was particularly acute in Georgia each April, The Masters - the only one of the Big Four he had never won - seeming to delight in finding ever new ways to mock his efforts.
Days before what would become his duel with destiny around Amen Corner, the temptation was still to cut and paste the old, timeworn arguments about Rory's state of mind and his chances.
To a degree not seen since the feral hysteria that pursued post-Saipan Roy Keane, McIlroy awakens the inner amateur psychologist in his vast audience.
It doesn’t matter if we are more fraud than Freud, any number of us were happy to offer an interpretation of McIlroy’s dreams.
He is worryingly carefree at The Masters one year, a creature of limitless despair by The Open a few months later. Too bouncy at Pebble Beach, absurdly hangdog at Southern Hills.
News that he made a two thousand mile round journey for a single lesson from Tiger's 80-year-old former coach, Butch Harmon, was dissected for evidence of enlightenment or fragility.
His every throwaway comment was placed on a Petri dish, then positioned under an unforgiving thousand-watt spotlight, to be analysed in search of a hidden window to the World Number Two's state of mind.
As the countdown was on to the Masters that would prove to be his liberation, doomsday interpretations were being drawn from the fact that while the planet's best player, Scottie Scheffler, had won twice in the previous three weeks, McIlroy's stalled motor seemed in urgent need of jump leads.
He had only a solitary top 20 finish on the PGA tour this season. A worrying snap hook off the tee had seen him plonk his ball in a watery grave ten times since a January victory in Dubai hinted at a year of plenty.
He is softer than a bag of marshmallows one week, infinitely too hard on himself the next.
Distracted by LIV and Greg Norman on the front nine, overly focused on the minutiae of his game on the way home.
Too upbeat in his self-analysis, except, of course, on those days he surrenders to bleak and terminal negativity.
His bad starts at majors? That’s an easy one to psychoanalyse. He is too anxious and wrapping himself up in knots of stress.
At least until that infamous live TV interview during his opening round at Augusta 12 months ago offered damning proof that he is infinitely too relaxed and eager to please.
As for his attitude to advice!
He is stubborn, a control-freak who won’t listen to anybody else. Actually, scratch that, he is an open book, being force-fed an excess of airy-fairy Bob Rotella soundbites.
Each time a beachhead of hope was established – a victory at the Tour Championship, Fed-Ex Cup glory, a return to the summit of the world rankings – it was immediately obliterated by a self-destructive major championship implosion.
A quadruple bogey at the first in Portrush. A pedestrian Augusta Thursday that cast him among the also-rans. An inability to find his best stuff on that Sunday at St Andrews when the Claret Jug was his for the taking.
There goes flaky Rory again.
When it comes to McIlroy at The Masters, the acreage of opinion flowered as colourfully as Amen Corner in springtime.
Observing the hideous gash Augusta's iceberg had frequently opened in the hull of his sanity, a suspicion lingered that raising the wreckage of the Titanic from its 12,000-feet deep aquatic tomb might not be as taxing.
In splicing the movie of his life, there are an abundance of soul-scarring Augusta days - none worse than the almost too painful to watch Friday implosion in 2024, a distance outside the cut line, on the same score as 64-year-old Larry Mize - that Rory would consign, like withered Amen Corner azaleas, to the cutting room floor.
Yet McIlroy declined to turn to that page in the Roberto Duran playbook where the only answer is to slump defeated onto a stool and say, “no mas”, no more.
There is a wise line from Joseph O’Connor’s novel, Shadowplay that says, “Tears are the part of grief visible above the water, they are not where the wreckage is done.”
Below the waterline, who knows what demons wrap their tentacles tightly around McIlroy's psyche?
Yet he refused to surrender, returning year after year, until on an unforgettable and crazy night in Georgia, he banished all the demons. And daubed the indelible ink of glory on those remaining blank pages of a now immortal golfing life.
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