Rory McIlroy, 35, is the winner of the 2025 Masters Tournament, which was held in Georgia on Sunday.
However, his path to victory was far from easy. Although McIlroy had competed in the tournament 16 times before, the coveted green jacket had consistently eluded him.
Even at his level, he struggles with performance anxiety. And the best way to overcome those pre-game jitters? Visualize the worst possible outcome, McIlroy said on the Thursday episode of “The Whoop Podcast.“
“I say this all the time. It’s counterintuitive to a lot of people to do this, but I do,” McIlroy said. “If you’re trying to overcome anxiety or nerves around performance, I try to think about, well, what’s the worst that could happen? I’m not going to die on the golf course.”
He recounted how he used to have “first tee nerves.” By visualizing the worst-case scenario, he was able to think of solutions to overcome any potential challenges.
“I would struggle on the first tee, and so, I would say to myself, well, what’s the worst that could happen? You hit it in the trees. OK, then what do you do? You go up there, and you figure it out,” McIlroy said, adding that he knew he was “skillful enough” to rectify a shot like that.
“For whatever reason, imagining the worst-case scenario gave me a level of comfort because I felt like any worst-case scenario that I could bring up in my head, I’d be able to deal with,” McIlroy said.
This visualization method gives him “a sense of freedom” on the greens.
“If I can swing free that’s when I play my best golf,” he added.
With the Masters win, McIlroy becomes the sixth golfer to achieve a Grand Slam. In men’s golf, a Grand Slam is when a player wins all four major tournaments — The Masters, the PGA Championship, the British Open, and the US Open — over the course of their careers.
“It feels incredible,” McIlroy told CBS in a broadcast following his win. “This is my 17th time here, and I started to wonder if it would ever be my time. The last 10 years coming here with the burden of the Grand Slam on my shoulders and trying to achieve that — I’m sort of wondering what we are going to talk about going into next year’s Masters. I’m honored and thrilled and so proud to call myself a Masters champion.”
In a video taken moments after his win, McIlroy could be seen giving his wife a hug and kiss, before picking up his daughter Poppy for an emotional embrace.
In an interview with CBS Sports on Saturday, McIlroy credited his 4-year-old daughter with helping him take his mind off golf, allowing him to reset before his next game.
“I sort of tried to leave what had happened here and I rushed out to see Poppy before she went to bed,” McIlroy said. “That’s something I didn’t have a few years ago, to be able to get home and have that, sort of, take my mind off the golf a little bit.”
A representative for McIlroy did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent by Business Insider outside regular hours.
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