Rory McIlroy - 4 Time Major Winner

There is a pathway for most people to play golf, anyone can play it?

Usual story. There’s a couple of prominent posters in this thread who get incredibly butthurt every time he wins and start the “but, but majors” every time to try to disparage it.

Funny one, and very difficult to quantify if you're talking about one sport vs another.

Golf is hard to fit in because even the most successful golfers of all time lose a lot more than they win.

I think Tiger has the highest win percent for golfers all time, and that's with a rate of about 22%, so still losing around 4 out of every 5 tournaments he entered over his career (and he was a complete freak at his peak which probably has coloured how we view every other golfers success since)

I think that Nicklaus (the man most put with Tiger as the 2 greatest of all time) is only around 12%, so losing 7 out of 8.

And Rory around 9%.

Whatever way you look at it, Rorys career is exceptional and he'll go down as one of the greatest golfers to ever play, never mind greatest Irish golfer.

I think the first Masters blow up hit him exceptionally hard, and the second bad loss, to Patrick Reed will have added scar tissue. He definitely has more majors in him and I hope he gets a couple more over the line but winning in golf is hard, and winning in majors even harder. 4 chances a year, against the best players on the planet.

Interesting discussion.

Team players are a cog in a machine. Roy Keane and Brian O'Driscoll were obviously on the apex of their respective sports. Roy on the best team in the world (unsure if true or not?), walked away from a grade B team in Saipan, not from injury or sickness, and given his role as a team player literally the largest fail a sportsperson could make at a time they are needed the most.

Ireland only become the best team in the world after BOD retired from rugby so from a stats perspective -he held back the team badly! 😄

Personally I think you need to go to individuals who live and die on their own performances to identify the best ever, as performance in a team is not clear.

This pool reduces to probably: Rory, Katie, Sonya, Padraig, Barry, Stephen, Sean, Michelle

Some of the above the legalities of their success is questionable unfortunately.

Rory jumps off the page here, followed by Sonya and Katie next. However we are on the Rory thread in a golf forum so a heavily biased answer!

A bit of recency bias in the above post. No mention of George Best, Eamon Coughlan, John Treacy or Ronnie Delaney. No names of anybody from GAA like Cooper, Cluxton or Shefflin. What about Cora Staunton who won 11 all-star awards, is considered the greatest GAA women's player of all time, won a women's FAI Cup in soccer, a Connacht championship in rugby and finished her career as an Aussie rules player where she was the top scorer for her club in four consecutive seasons.

Still none of them are in the frame for best Irish sportsperson. I'll put up two, there's a third but I can't remember his name.

It's between,

Tony McCoy who broke multiple records as a jump jockey. 20 times champion jockey and jockey of the year. British and Irish sports personality of the year awards. OBE and MBE for his contribution to sport. Most winners by a jockey ever in the UK and Ireland, and it's not even close. Complete domination of the sport for twenty years. Won all the majors at Cheltenham and every grand national including the biggest one.

Martin Sheridan who won three Olympic gold medals at the start of the twentieth century, all in the discus. He also won a bronze in the standing long jump.

When they decided to have an Olympic games every two years, it only happened once in 1906, he won the discus and shot putt and had three silver medals in the standing long jump, high jump and stone throw.

He held multiple world records. All this while working in the New York police.

I would think being ranked in the top 20 golfers of all time would be a fairly significant accolade, coming from a small country, given the other names that would be on that list

I didn't change anything I said though. Nothing I subsequently said changes my viewpoint that I think he'll be recognised as one of the greatest golfers. Some will say he underachiever, and that's a reasonable argument, but it doesn't take from his actual achievements

I'm not going to get into a semantic argument over it though

Top 20 isn’t one of the greatest golfers. You can have 20 “greats”.

Rory was/is brilliant but unless he bags a few more majors or the Masters, he isn’t one of the greats.

I think if he wins the Masters, he unquestionably joins the pantheon of the greats of the game by virtue of having won them all at least once, until then, he is well below the likes of Nicklaus, Woods, Hagen, Hogan, Player etc.

Super thought process.

Alternatively, some look at him solely as a golfer rather than as an Irish golfer.

I look at him as a Golfer not really a fan but I would class him as one of the greats of my generation.