They hid it well, but golf was getting jumpy about its loss of box office buck with the slide of Tiger Woods. Too many good players and too few billboard stars was the curse settling on a sport that needs household names to launch itself beyond the Arcadian heartland.
Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Seve Ballesteros, Woods and now Rory McIlroy have been the post-Corinthian proselytisers for a game with declining participation and an image problem in this age of instant gratification. McIlroy's talent, fizzing on the launch pad, is now the full starburst as that global constituency - the floating television viewer - cranes its neck to see what the fuss is about.
On both sides of the Atlantic - courtesy of his back-to-back Open Championship and US PGA victories - the non-aficionado sees a 25-year-old from Belfast replanted in West Palm Beach recovering from a break-up with a leading tennis player by farming three trophies in a row and perhaps consigning the Woods era to sepia - in Valhalla, named after the resting place for Nordic warriors.
Irritation at the constant Woods-McIlroy comparisons is understandable. But it comes with the territory for a sport that needs hooks beyond birdies and bogies. The Woods-Nicklaus notional struggle has given way to the Woods-McIlroy Roman buggy race, which looks like ending with Woods writhing on the fairway, clutching parts of his body made sore by his violently assertive swing.
Nobody is saying McIlroy is a more gifted, prolific or historically important figure than Woods. Nor should this summer's poster boy be judged solely against the backdrop of Tiger's fading reign-by-fear.
The excitability, though, is not mere single-summer giddiness. The events of the last 22 days suggest that McIlroy has found a way to organise and impose his talent on his contemporaries.
"I just immersed myself in my game," he says. "I get up in the morning, I go to the golf course, I go to the gym. It works pretty well, so I'm going to keep doing it. It's my life at the minute."
Despite his 2011 US Open and 2012 US PGA wins, there was always a suspicion that he was a hot-and-cold prodigy who needed everything in his favour to summon the will to win.
Those doubts seem pretty ragged now. © The Daily Telegraph
Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package. 
