You Gotta Call It A Choke

Rory McIlroy's closing stretch at the US Open was a textbook choke, but golf writers are avoiding that word.

Aug 09, 2024

Rory McIlroy was +3 on the final five holes of this year’s US Open to lose the tournament by one stroke.

Obviously, Rory was not playing this poorly throughout all four rounds. Only when he was on the precipice of winning a US Open and ending his decade-long major drought did his play dramatically falter.

From another perspective, after his 13th hole, Rory was mathematically very likely to win the US Open. Data Golf writes:

Through 13 holes in the final round of last week's U.S. Open, Rory McIlroy had a 2-shot lead over Bryson DeChambeau, and our model gave him a 77% chance of winning.

If that isn’t a choke to you, I don’t know what would be. However, not many big-time golf publications labeled it this way explicitly.

Here are three pieces from some of my favorite golf media outlets:

I highly recommend reading all three because they each approach the tournament’s conclusion with differing and satisfying lenses.

However, the words “choke” and “collapse” are surprisingly absent from all of these articles. Instead, we get words that imply a choke occurred without definitively stating it; words like heartbreak, haunting, and funeral. These are not words anyone would use to describe an event where a strong competitor gets bested by someone simply performing better. Those are words that describe a self-inflicted slow death, a choke.

Why are we dancing around the subject? Look at Rory’s face. I don’t think it can be any more obvious that internally he believes he just choked away the US Open.

Maybe the guarded language used in the pieces above is motivated by some journalistic integrity not to assume what caused the athlete’s actions. Classifying something as a choke is harsh and observers can never be certain a choke occurred. It could just be bad physical execution. Yet, these recaps seemed to approach Rory’s atrocious finish overly diplomatically. I was shocked to never encounter the word choke in any of these pieces. In fact, I had to double-check each one using CTRL+F to ensure this was the case. There seems to be a stigma from professional golf writers against using the word choke, which I find frustrating.

What frustrates me the most is that if we’re not going to call this a choke, we can’t really call anything a choke. The biggest name in golf, who’s a proven winner, had his game completely evaporate down the stretch! I highly doubt we’re going to see more pronounced examples of chokes than this very frequently, if at all. There’s a non-zero chance we never see a choke to this degree in a major ever again.

No doubt, across innumerable group chats, fans described the events to each other as a choke. It’s the simplest assessment of the way things played out. Labelling Rory’s performance a choke properly captures the essence and the lasting memories of 2024 US Open’s finale. Therefore, that’s how one should write about it.

What else needs to occur before golf media unanimously declares a series of events a choke? Because chokes do happen. Chokes are a real thing. We can’t act like they don’t exist. There’s a whole list of them here on Wikipedia. Speaking of which, Wikipedia offers a strong opening paragraph defining a choke:

In sports, choking is the failure of a person, or persons, to act or behave as anticipated or expected.This can occur in a game or tournament that they are strongly favoured to win, or in an instance where they have a large lead that they squander in the late stages of the event. It can also refer to repeated failures in the same event, or simply imply an unexpected failure when the event is more important than usual.

I don’t think we can come up with a more fitting example of a choke based on that definition than what McIlroy did. Rory did not behave as expected. He squandered a (somewhat) large lead in the late stages of the event. Not only were there the unacceptable individual mistakes like the missed putt on 16, but Rory lost the ability to execute with precision down the stretch. He lined up left on 17 and didn’t cut it. He lined up left again on the tee on 18 and didn’t cut it again. The ball was being put in bad spots and greens were being missed. His only real highlight late in the round was a greenside bunker shot on the 17th hole to recover from a poor tee shot. There were many unexpected failures over the last five holes. This was a textbook choke.

I also like how this Bleacher Report article describes chokes via the famous Potter Stewart quote: “You know it when you see it”. With Rory’s final five holes, we all saw it. I wanted to crawl into a hole after watching that collapse as I’m sure Rory did as well.

These golf writers must have seen it too, but they decided to remain disappointingly noncommittal with their language, which misrepresented the core storyline. In my opinion, it’s disingenuous not to label this a choke. Rory’s choke was the crux of the back nine at the US Open, not Bryson winning. Go back to the articles I linked earlier and review their titles. None of them mention Bryson, most mention Rory. Rory was the story and he was the story because he uncharacteristically choked. Over the years, Rory has proven he can close out events, including a recent emphatic win at Quail Hollow. He isn’t a choker per se1, which makes the fact that he wilted under pressure even more revealing and consequential. Rory’s choke allows observers to grasp how important winning that next major and ending his major dry spell is to him internally. He felt immense pressure to win this event because he cared deeply about this result. The choke was only made possible because the event was much more important than usual. That is the story. So it’s not cruel to present this result as a choke, it’s sincere.

The US Open at Pinehurst was the best viewing for a major I have ever experienced2. I was rooting for Rory, but witnessing a choke is exhilarating. Watching athletes quake in the face of their dreams, succumbing to internal fears instead of striving forth into the abyss is captivating. That was an unforgettable and undoubtedly iconic major, made possibly by a choke from one of the world’s best golfers. Please use the words that describe what happened.

Thanks for reading.

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