Rory McIlroy’s nearly perfect PGA round on a beautiful day provided the perfect escape

NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. — Let’s do some elevation work here. Can we? It’s almost three o’clock on Saturday afternoon and here’s Rory McIlroy on the 17th, the last of Aronimink’s show-us-what-you-got par-3s. We take a look at the Masters champion, the only man in the world to win a one-year Grand Slam in 2026. You can see the wee button on the top of his Nike baseball cap. His shirt tails are more on the outside than on the inside.

Rory is in the dead center of your watch dial here, let’s just say. If you look at it that way, Brooks Koepka, McIlroy’s third round partner, is 10 o’clock, he has already run to the 18th tee, and for a few seconds McIlroy is standing alone on the 17th green, motionless, doing nothing but holding the putter and looking at the hole, and it seems that he is lost in time. He had just made bogey, which was good, all things considered. From there he went to one (fried-egg lie in the greenside trap) and two (lie lies in greenside rough)? It could have been worse.

That’s what a 4-bit view does there. Golf loves the micro. You can get lost in golf like you can get lost in a movie, or in a dream. Modern life doesn’t give you that many opportunities to get lost, with our electronic leashes and all. There is a movie about jazz legend Chet Baker called “Let’s Get Lost.” Maybe you’ve seen it. In some of his gigs, he played until the sun came up.

Let’s head north, into the blue skies of this beautiful May day, here on the edge of Great Line horse country. You can see the ripples on the lake in front of the 17th green as the wind blows up. Two days of cool air and warm air on Saturday – perfect. The nearby grandmothers are packed.

We’re going up and now the whole course is unfolding. It’s big and bright and hilly and every shade of green. You can see the golfers going at it, a championship golf show. You can see the Tudor clubhouse with its red tiled roof, 100 years old and looking like it was flown in from the English countryside. In the quieter moments — dusk on a quiet autumn day, say — the lobby is abuzz as your foursome packs up and heads out. No cheating this week. Everything is buzzing. The clubhouse looks like the manor house in “Howards End,” if you know that movie.

The players, about 70 of them, are on their way. The leaders of the second round are on the first hole. Jon Rahm is deep on the front nine, chasing. Elsewhere, Scottie Scheffler and Xander Schauffele and Ludwig Aberg did the same. Elsewhere, there are Matti Schmid, Chris Gotterup, Maverick McNealy, who do the same. Golf thrives in this stew.

Whatever Gil Hanse and the Aronimink team are doing on this golf course, it’s working. He has been coming to this course for 40 years. It has never looked better. All these exposed hilltops, all these wind-blown golfers trying to solve the puzzles of these greens. It’s difficult, rightly so. This is championship golf, the whole world of golf comes together in the name of this strange race that attracts many of us. One major per month: April, May, June, July. Short season. If you’re going to win a single-season Grand Slam, you have to stay hot for 12 weeks. Rory is at the center of that story, this year. It’s impossible.

If there was ever a better day than this, you can’t remember. You are so struck by the things that are happening here, here at the top of the funnel, you are looking at all this golf.

He launched a booster rocket and now he’s over a Goodyear Blimp. There is the Merion Golf Club and its two courses; there is the Merion Cricket Club and its grass fields; there is a campus of Lower Merion High School and somewhere else where its gym, where Kobe launched all those 2, his NBA dreams along with it. There are the steps of the Art Museum (“Rocky”), the railroad entrance to the 30th Street Station (“Witness”), the wooden shingles over Independence Hall (“1776”). Here it is, 250 years later.

Rory McIlroy, like other artists before him, can be difficult to predict. He made a 5 on the par-5 16th, where he would have liked, and maybe half-expected, to make a 4. He made a 4 on the 17th where he is one of the hard iron shot away from making a tap-in 3. Still, good progress: 74, 67, 66. At the end of the game on Saturday, he was 3 under a small shot on the trip of Alexey. These leads can be fragile things, as Rory McIlroy, among many others, has shown us.

He lives in the house next to the course and watches “The Dark Knight,” the Batman movie, at night, to pieces. The film is two and a half hours long, and aptly titled. On Saturday, McIlroy got out of bed and walked into all this sunshine playing golf, sunshine in every sense of the word. The chaos of the world, for half a day, however, seemed far away.

“You can, you can go into a cocoon,” said Rory on Saturday, spending a few minutes, in no rush, really, to go anywhere, his breath full, like everyone else. “You do that more at the Masters than anywhere else – that whole week you don’t seem to know what’s going on around the world. It’s not the same here, but for us, this golf tournament is the most important thing in our lives right now. It’s still with things: Trump’s trip to China and all that. But when you’re here at the tournament, when we’re here, we don’t want us to get to the tournament. We, this is it.”

Us.

Rory’s we it may be the players and maybe the caddies, other coaches, families if they are fighting. But from above, from 30,000 feet, you can’t tell Jon Rahm from Crew Koepka, son of a golfer, who is there this Saturday afternoon. Us it’s the whole group gathered here, on this wonderful course, on this wonderful season, on this wonderful day. Golf gives us a break here. Break and vacation.