No Father’s Day joy as McIlroy finishes final round with a 73

There was no final flurry for Rory McIlroy yesterday as he finished his fourth round with a 73, one shot better than his Saturday performance.

McIlroy broke his self-imposed ban on social media to post a photo with his father, Gerry, on Twitter on Father’s Day. Yesterday’s smiles were genuine, and rightly so; after all, the 25-year-old – first introduced to the sport by his dad as a toddler with plastic clubs before progressing on to cut-down irons – has grown up to be one of sport’s global players, one of those with genuine box-office appeal.

Yet, not for the first time this season, McIlroy headed to the first tee of a final round aware that his chance of a victory had been undone by a sequence of poor holes in the middle of a round before the day when titles are won.

In this case, here at the 114th US Open in Pinehurst, it was his third round on Saturday that was his undoing.

On the one occasion this season when McIlroy avoided any mid-round disasters, he won. That was in triumphing at the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth last month. Elsewhere, though, it has been a case of one bad period in one round when things have got away from him that has proved not only frustrating but hard to understand. Even for the player himself.

Curbing his enthusiasm

On Saturday evening, in trying to comprehend why he should take 40 strokes on a front nine and remove himself from those chasing

Martin Kaymer

, McIlroy observed that perhaps the answer lay in curbing his enthusiasm to hit perfect shots.

“It might be a little bit to do with once I get on a [bad] run and maybe trying a little too hard to get out of it and that compounds the issue,” he said.

“I need to figure out these golf holes of hole [in a round] where, instead of being four over or five over, maybe one under or two over, just limiting the damage a little bit.”

Getting on a poor run has been a regrettable feature of McIlroy’s season, all the more bewildering in that – regardless – he has consistently featured in the top 10 and has come close to winning on three occasions: in Abu Dhabi (where he incurred a two-shot penalty and finished runner-up); the Honda Classic, where he lost in a playoff;  and the BMW PGA, the only one in which he successfully closed the deal.

In more cases than not, the second round has proven to be McIlroy’s downfall: in the Masters, he shot a 77 in the second round, after which he remarked: “I’m just not getting anything out of my game at the minute . . . I just haven’t quite been able to get on a run.”

That round in Augusta saw him drop four shots shortly after the turn, going double bogey-bogey-par-bogey from the 10th. In the Wells Fargo Championship at Quail Hollow, McIlroy’s woes again came in the second round, a 76 that saw him drop five strokes in three holes where a bogey on the second was followed by double bogeys on the third and fourth.

In the Players championship at Sawgrass, his second round featured a run of bogey-bogey-bogey-double bogey-bogey from the third; and, in the Memorial tournament, where he opened with a 63, McIlroy followed up with a second round 78 that featured three double bogeys in a row from the 13th.

‘Bounced back’

To McIlroy’s credit, he has bounced back each and every time from those sequences of poor holes. On Saturday, he recovered from that front nine 40 to come home in 34 for a 74. And, yesterday, he covered that same front nine in level-par.

Graeme McDowell finished on a more positive note, having endured a tough time on Friday and Saturday as his challenge faded away.

The 2010 US Open champion finished with a closing 70 for 287, seven-over-par, and intends to take in a reconnaissance visit to Hoylake – where next month’s British Open takes place – before moving on to Fota Island for the Irish Open on Thursday.

McDowell had headed to the range immediately after finishing his round on Saturday and got off to a great start yesterday with two birdies in his opening three holes before dropping a shot on the fourth.

Having turned in 34, he picked up another birdie on the par-five 10th only to suffer back-to-back bogeys on the 12th and 13th before finishing with five straight pars.

“I take the positives away from where my game is at going forward into a busy summer,” said McDowell, who felt that his driver and putter had let him down.

“They have been killers for me. They are normally my strengths, hitting fairways and holing putts, but I am not hitting fairways right now and I was really putting too much pressure on the putter.

“I couldn’t get the ball within four feet half the time and you are long distance putting all the time, leaving yourself six feet, 10 feet all the time. It kind of wore me out in the end.

“Friday and Saturday were difficult days but it’s nice to finish on a good note. The last 27 holes, I started to dig deep and put some dollars on the board and some [Ryder Cup] points on the board.”