It's easy to be complacent about the level of Irish achievement in worldwide professional golf these days given ten major championship victories by Irish players over the last 17 years, so 2024 seemed to pass with a relatively 'ho-hum’ scale of appreciation.
In truth though, it came tantalisingly close to being one of the great years in Irish golf history.
There was Rory McIlroy’s US Open near-miss tale at Pinehurst where a two-shot lead on the back nine evaporated with three bogies in the last four holes leaving him one short of a play-off. Shane Lowry led the Open at Royal Troon after seven holes of round three and was a 12-foot putt away from shooting the lowest major championship 18-hole score in history at the USPGA Championship in which he was right in contention deep into Sunday afternoon.
On the credit side, there were four tournament wins in the year for McIlroy (one of them at the Zurich Classic shared with Lowry) but his season was also characterised by too many agonising experiences.
The US Open was the most stark of those but he was also on the receiving end of three other 18th green sucker punches - in Dubai in January and at both the Amgen Irish Open at Royal County Down and BMW Championship at Wentworth in September.
It was still a good but not a great year for McIlroy. He himself rated it in the B category and that seems about right given his high standards of ‘A grade’ campaigns in years past.
Four major championship victories between 2011 and 2014; three Fedex Cup successes in 2016, 2019 and 2022 along with 122 weeks at World No 1 since 2012 sets a high bar.
He achieved nothing on that scale in 2024 but four victories and abundant consistency kept him in the top three of the world rankings and was at least admirable, albeit without sufficient peaks.
There was one particular highlight with a standout five-stroke victory in the Wells Fargo signature event on the PGA Tour in May where his final round of 65 helped him breeze past the third round leader Xander Schauffele who would go on to win his first major - the PGA Championship - seven days later.
But that was a fleeting glimpse of vintage McIlroy and he himself knows only too well and too painfully the effect of the four gut-punch defeats he suffered in 2024.
If ever he had to take stock of his physical game and how he applies it to tension-filled phases of a major championship, it seems that this winter break might be the time for the most serious of all his end-of-season evaluations.
McIlroy’s Achilles heel has always been closer related to his shot selection in critical situations as distinct from shot execution or frailty of nerve, although the latter may possibly become an issue if the scar tissue of successive reversals of fortune aggregate in his mind.
Gone, probably forever, is the devil-may-care kid who won four majors by his mid-20s, so whatever McIlroy version 2.0 or 3.0 or 4.0 will emerge in 2025, he knows he must find a way of converting more of the opportunities he creates by stealth rather than trying to trample over fields as he did in 2011 and 2012.
That may require a quieter mind in the heat of battle. Or a more active one according to the greatest major championship player in history, Jack Nicklaus, who has occasionally mentored McIlroy since they bumped into each other at a shopping centre in Florida in 2009.
Like so many observers and admirers of McIlroy’s generational talent, Nicklaus now shares the frustration in watching Rory’s travails, especially on final days in majors.
This was what he noted when speaking on a Nick Faldo podcast in 2023: "He has (trouble) keeping his focus for some reason. I don't know what it is.
"He just plays golf. And sometimes, you really can't just play golf."
Faldo asked Nicklaus to explain what that means."Well, I look at Augusta," Nicklaus added.
"Everybody knows Augusta pretty much. There's about six shots that you better pay attention to. Your tee shot at two, your second shot on 11, tee shot at 12, your tee shot at 13, and the second shot at 13, and the (second) shot at 15.
"Those six shots, if you've played those shots smart, play them intelligently and put them in the conservative side of the ledger, the rest of the golf course is not very hard. And so Rory, sometimes, gets caught up in just playing golf and all of a sudden: Where did that eight come from?
"And he's too good for that. He's too good of a player. And maybe he tries to keep himself too relaxed. I was never relaxed. I always wanted to be on point, every shot," Nicklaus concluded.
Whatever McIlroy emerges in the early months of the New Year, he will know that what separates him from true greatness in terms of his legacy in the game, is victory in the one particular major championship alluded to by Nicklaus.
Since winning the Open at Royal Liverpool more than a decade ago to move within a Green Jacket of completing the career grand slam, a question he has invariably faced before the Masters almost every year in the last ten, has been among the hardest to answer: "What would it mean to you to win the Masters and complete the career Grand Slam?"
It’s hard to answer because to acknowledge and speak openly about it would possibly make it bigger than it already is in the back of his mind.
It would pretty much mean everything to him. He could retire from the game with his place in history assured and all the career reversals of fortune placed into a blurred-out background perspective.
There’s also the possibility that if he won at Augusta next April or in the next few years, it could unlock another few major victories to take him past Ballesteros (5) and Faldo (6) and thus become the greatest European player since the advent of the current Grand Slam configuration of championships.
That’s what’s at stake.
Maybe he has four or five realistic attempts left to get it right in the Masters and the first major of the year will tell a lot about whether or not he has found a way to draw strength from his considerable travails in 2022, 2023 and most searingly of all, in the year just past.
McIlroy wasn’t the only Irish player to mention the passage of time in 2024. Back in January, before Shane Lowry hit a competitive ball in his season, he referred to the fact that he could not ignore that he was closer to 40 than 30 and that it nagged him that he may only have a few more years to be truly competitive at the top end of the game.
It turned out to be a groundless fear. With early season top four finishes on the PGA Tour, he combined with McIlroy to win the Zurich Classic team event in late April and then challenged seriously in two majors with top-six finishes in the PGA and Open Championships before a season-ending top-three finish in his final event in Dubai.
Firmly ensconced inside the top 50 at the end of the year, Lowry should have a full season in the majors ahead and a sense of renewal in his game after his most consistent ever season on the PGA Tour.
There was also much to admire in the performance of Tom McKibbin over the course of 2024 and his campaign to win a PGA Tour card came down to a three foot putt on the final green of his season in Dubai. In holing it, he clinched his PGA Tour card by an extremely narrow margin, all before his 22nd birthday.
The rise of McKibbin, since turning professional in 2021, has been something to behold as he has progressed to Challenge Tour in his first season, then to the DP World Tour where he won the European Open in 2023 and then on to punching his ticket to America in 2024.
There’ll also be plenty of eyes in 2025 on Seamus Power after a strong finish to the season easily kept his PGA Tour playing rights.
There was also a DP World Tour card for Conor Purcell and Challenge Tour status for Max Kennedy which marks them down for ones to be watched in the coming year.
And on the PGA Champions Tour, three victories for Padraig Harrington helped him to fourth place in the final year standings with more than $2 million dollars in prizemoney.
Leona Maguire’s season saw her fall back in the Rolex World Rankings but still remain in the top 60, largely thanks to a win in the Aramco Team Series event in London on the LET and a runner-up finish in the LPGA Matchplay in April.
The work she needs to address on her game, based on her season’s statistics, if she is to climb back into the top ten in the world, is mainly off the tee and on the greens.
Lauren Walsh enhanced her main Ladies European Tour card to full status by finishing a fine 18th in the 2024 Order of Merit while the number of Irish players on that tour will be increased significantly by the full LET playing rights achieved by three rookies, Anna Foster, Sarah Byrne and Annabel Wilson.
All of which augurs well for 2025 on arguably the broadest level ever in the Irish professional game for both men and women.
