Paul Gray would just tut, shake his head and discard them in the nearest bin.
The teaching professional at Holywood Golf Club had grown so accustomed to finding scribbled scorecards littered around his shop that he did not see the need to retain them.
The content was predictable, if not ultimately prophetic. Competition: Open Championship, then a litany of birdies and eagles tallied in the column reserved for the player’s strokes.
At the bottom, a confidently scrawled signature, even for an 11-year-old boy whose primary means of expression was typically driver or putter.
“It was always an incredible score, like 8- or 9-under,” says Gray, now the club’s general manager.
“And he’d sign it ‘Rory McIlroy’. Then in the marker’s box it was either ‘Nick Faldo’ or ‘Tiger Woods’.
“At the time I didn’t think anything of it, but I look back now and realise he was dreaming big even then. I got them all the time, just sitting about, so I’d chuck them away. Wish I’d kept them now.”
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Holywood Golf Club sits not far from Belfast city centre, just past the shipyard that built the Titanic, a stone’s throw from George Best Airport and above the Palace Barracks that housed the British Army during The Troubles, the darkest blot on Northern Ireland’s history.
The clubhouse sits at the top of a steep drive, a modest building in a largely working-class area, a far cry from the millions and the mansions that now frame the life of golf’s current No 1.
It is here he fell in love with the game, honed the technique that has, at age 25, carried him to four major championships and to the verge of completing the career grand slam, at the Masters this April.
It is an unlikely story but, then again, one that always seemed destined for glory. Rory McIlroy: Made in Holywood.
“I remember one evening, my wife and I were out playing and Rory joined us; he might have been eight or nine years of age,” says Peter McMillen, a club member for the best part of 40 years. “He was tiny … I mean, tiny.
“Just this little lad, playing on his own, the golf bag bigger than him and banging off the backs of his ankles.
“Every other club was a driver. First hole: driver, driver, two putts, par. Second hole: same thing. He was such an impressive ball-striker.
“It was just amazing.”
It was nothing new. McIlroy was attracting attention almost as soon as he learned to walk, armed with plastic golf club and chasing golf balls around the club’s main restaurant as his parents, Gerry and Rosie, chewed the fat while juggling jobs to keep alive their son’s dream.
From a fine golfing background, Gerry worked behind the bar and was often the toast of the place, too, crowned club champion five times between 1992 and 2000. Gerry’s brother, Colm, was champion in 2012; the brothers taking the lead from their father, Jimmy, a talented player in his own right.
The third generation was extra special, though.
Before long, he was granted exceptional status, as well.
At Holywood, the age to join had always been 12, yet at seven McIlroy was being fast-tracked through the membership process. Michael Bannon, the head professional at the time and McIlroy’s coach to this day, was so excited by his pupil’s pedigree that he had a quiet word with the junior convener.
“This kid’s brilliant,” Bannon said. “We need to have him as a member of the club. He’s going to be great.” So the club promptly changed their rules.
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Dedicated to his development, soon McIlroy was displaying a larger-than-life appetite across the board.
Gabby Maguire, the restaurant manager, recalls a moment sometime around McIlroy’s success in Miami at the world championship for nine- to 10-year-olds, when he first met the youngster. Already, McIlroy displayed grand ambition.
“I gave him a junior menu, with wee hamburgers and bits on it,” Maguire says.
“And he looked up and said, ‘I’ll have an eight-ounce steak medium-to-well, thank you.’ That was the beginning of it all.”
True to point, McIlroy was only getting started. He quickly worked his way through age-group competitions, often defeating boys five or six years older, then hoarded a string of regional and national titles.
In 2005, he triumphed in the West of Ireland Championship and within four months became the youngest player to win the Irish Amateur Close Championship, carding a competitive-course-record 61 around Royal Portrush.
Ricky McCormick, assistant pro at Holywood and one of McIlroy’s closest friends, caddied for him that day.
“It was literally like watching Tiger Woods on the PlayStation,” McCormick says.
“By the 17th, everyone had heard what was going on and the crowd got that big going up the fairway that I was actually lost behind it, stranded with his bag. For three or four minutes, I was like, ‘Where is he?’ His play was just flawless that day, pretty special.”
The succeeding period has been just as phenomenal, as an area at Holywood attests.
In a section affectionately known as Rory’s Corner, a stream of photographs chronicle his golfing growth.
There are pictures of a young McIlroy with Darren Clarke and Faldo, mentors to the young star whose achievements he would swiftly set about surpassing.
McIlroy has donated to the collection: the scorecard from Royal Portrush, his bag from the 2010 Ryder Cup and a handwritten thank-you note to Holywood Golf Club, which sits alongside memorabilia from his first major triumph, the 2011 US Open. Given the immediate aftermath of that record-setting romp around Congressional, it was the least he could do.
“That was huge,” Gray says. “On the Sunday night, in the old clubhouse, it was crazy.
“There were people here from everywhere, some we hadn’t seen in years. But the next day was just nuts. The phone never stopped.”
Gray took a call that Monday morning from Chubby Chandler, who was then McIlroy’s manager. Chandler wanted the club to host a news conference on Wednesday and planned to invite the world’s media: the BBC, Sky Sports, CNN, Golf Channel and ESPN. For 48 hours, little old Holywood became golf’s Tinseltown.
“We had special banners made up, and got security in,” Gray says. “It was frantic. Everyone was phoning, asking if Rory was going to be here, but I’d been told not tell anyone. We still had a couple of hundred people knocking about the place.”
The club’s website was even more heavily populated. Regularly doing around 1,300 hits per day, that Monday it vaulted to 28,000.
“If you think about it, this wee club had people from all over the world just land on it, more or less take it over,” Gray says.
“The media were running around getting interviews and the members were coming off the green thinking, ‘What’s going on?’ But they were all enthused by it. They were long-time members who’d watched Rory growing up.”
McMillen has had a ringside seat to the show. He has charted McIlroy’s remarkable rise, although to label it is as such would suggest it was somewhat unexpected. For those at Holywood Golf Club, the wee boy with the prodigious talent was always fated for greatness.
“I was on the putting green with my two daughters and Rory was there, too. He would’ve been 13 or 14 at the time,” McMillen says. “I had an old Titleist cap and I said: ‘Rory, do me a favour, sign that cap for me.’ This guy’s a future British Open champion.’
“Everyone, including Rory, just looked at me. But he signed it. I still have the cap. I’ve wore it so often the signature’s worn off.”
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While McIlroy’s allure is enduring, even as he strikes off another major or milestone, he does not show it.
Ask anyone and the response rings familiar: despite the majors and the world ranking, it is the exact same Rory, feet planted firmly on the ground while his game goes stratospheric.
“That’s the reason he’s so well-liked,” McCormick says. “He’s very honest, very level-headed and us – his friends and family – we keep him quite grounded. Nothing’s changed.
“I’m a big Liverpool fan and unfortunately he’s [Manchester] United, so I still just give him stick about the football or whatever else is going on.”
McCormick is standing within sight of the giant McIlroy poster peering down at him in a pro shop well-stocked with the golfer’s trademark apparel.
Not surprisingly, given the club boasts around 160 juniors, it has been doing a roaring trade. The fact that McIlroy signed an endorsement deal two years ago with another manufacturer has hardly stemmed the tide.
“It used to be Oakley, but all the kids are now running around head-to-toe in Nike, little Rory wannabes,” McCormick says. “His influence here is massive.”
jmcauley@thenational.ae
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