Broken body, broken mind

Former champions Woods and Mcllroy try to lift the heaviness that surrounds them at Troon

- JOE CALLAGHAN

Tiger Woods texted words of encouragement to Rory McIlroy after the latter’s collapse at the U.S. Open last month. “It means a lot that he reached out,” McIlroy said.

It’s not just the phones that are broken. Since April 1997, when Tiger Woods changed the game forever with his Augusta masterpiece, he and Rory McIlroy have been the foremost faces and loudest voices in golf. Others have risen up, spoken up, but the Woods-McIlroy run — at times a duopoly, more recently a one-sided tag-team — has nonetheless been the dominant one. Which is what made Tuesday in Troon all the more striking.

Mere hours apart, Woods and McIlroy appeared before the world’s media and, in remarkably similar tones, looked less sure of their individual and combined selves than any time in the past 27 years. One came in to talk about how he is trying to defy a broken body, the other to discuss how he is trying to heal a broken mind.

It was Tiger and Rory but not as untouchable master and gifted apprentice, the Nike commercial sidekicks seeing off all comers — sometimes with a snarl, often a smile — always operating on a ruthless and relentless level that only the other could reach. This was something altogether more frail, a sense of something now potentially fleeting.

At the centre of it all, maybe the cure for at least some of these ills and ailments, is an enduring friendship — even if they can’t quite connect like before.