Rory McIlroy has set his sights on the illusive green jacket after a strong start to the year – and has opened up about the moment his daughter realised his golfing fame
Rory McIlroy has revealed that his daughter had a touching question for him ahead of the Masters – after her father became the talk of her school thanks to his Players Championship win.
After defeating J.J. Spaun in a playoff at TPC Sawgrass, the Northern Irishman won the ‘fifth major’ for the second time. He opened up at Augusta National this week about how the tournament will be different for him this time, now that his daughter, Poppy, is old enough to understand what is happening.
He said: “After the Players, it was the first time she sort of realised what I did. That was really cool, also a little scary at the same time. Look, it’s amazing that I can share these things with her and Erica [Stoll]. The day after the Players she went into school and there were some kids who had said some stuff to her. She came home and said: ‘Daddy are you famous?’ – I said ‘it depends who you talk to!’”
McIlroy described his sporting fame as a “double-edged sword” and said that while you have to temper the expectations sometimes, Poppy is “an amazing addition to life”.
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McIlroy welcomed Poppy in 2020 with his wife, Erica Stoll. He told Golfweek after his daughter’s birth that becoming a father was “probably the best part of being a human being” and said it “puts things in perspective”.
“[My career] matters to me and I care about it very much, but at the same time, it makes the hard days a little easier to get over, right,” he said.
The 35-year-old added: “You feel like you get to know your baby while she’s still in her mother’s belly, but to go from not having met this person to having unconditional love for them, there’s nothing like it in the world.”
This week, McIlroy will be looking to complete the career grand slam and win the green jacket after so many near-misses. However, this year he will be coming to Augusta as one of the favourites thanks to his impressive 2025 run thus far.
He explained that he has shown “quite a lot of resilience from setbacks” and has tried to put those learnings into practice. McIlroy famously suffered a collapse at the US open last year in Pinehurst and left the course before the trophy was presented to Bryson DeChambeau.
“Look, you have setbacks and you have disappointments, but as long as you can learn from them and move forward and try to put those learnings into practice I feel like is very, very important,” he said.
“Look, when you have a long career like I have had, luckily, you sort of just learn to roll with the punches, the good times, the bad times, knowing that if you do the right work and you practice the right way, that those disappointments will turn into good times again pretty soon.”