Rory McIlroy still has much to do to be the king of the golfing world
Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy won the PGA Championship this year by record eight strokes and people once again started comparing him with the legendary Tiger Woods.
Let us get real for a moment: Rory McIlrоy is not Tiger Wоods.
McIlroy is likeable and people want him to win every time he enters a field. However, he cannot be rated as a replacement for Tiger Woods, one of the greatest players in the history of the sport.
Someday, he might get that status, but not now. Weighing him against Woods is like comparing Robert Griffin III to Brett Favre the moment after he won the first NFL game of his career.
McIlroy certainly dominated at Kiawah Island and did it way better than anyone else throughout the year. He won by eight strokes same as he did last year at the US Open.
Yet, his PGA Championship victory was not a string of consecutive wins with such huge margin. It would be easy to compare him with Woods if it was something more significant than just his second major win. But it is not.
Graeme McDowell, who is McIlroy’s closest friend on the PGA Tour, also rejected the idea of comparing both the players.
"It's tough to say that Rory is a Tiger Woods type player," McDowell said. "Tiger Woods is a once-in-a-lifetime player, and Rory is at least a once-in-a-decade type player”.
As it stands, McIlroy now has two major golf championships recorded on his resume and are the most dominant performances of his career. However, he still has to prove that they were not just strokes of luck for him.
This does not mean that McIlroy cannot reach the stage where Woods currently is. He has plenty of time to make it to that point. Woods himself admitted that McIlroy had the potential to reach the top of the golfing world with the passage of time.
“He has all of the components to be the best player in the world, there’s no doubt,” Woods said back in March 2009. “It’s just a matter of time and experience, and then basically gaining that experience in big events. Just give him some time, and I’m sure
he’ll be there”.
However, making comparisons between the two at this stage is a premature act. Despite the fact that Woods also sees McIlroy as the next king of the sport, the time is very, very far off when all the golf communities will accept him as the rightful of the
crown.
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