Rory McIlroy career perspective obvious at Zurich Classic one year later

While the LPGA Tour is seeing its first major of the year kick off this week in the Chevron Championship at The Woodlands, the PGA Tour has one of its more unique offerings not too far away in New Orleans.

The Zurich Classic is where the PGA Tour is stopping by this week and its team format is what separates it from any other normal event that we see across the season on an annual basis. Watching the best players in the world go at things in pairs is always fun and different.

As if the event didn’t draw you in on the appeal of team golf, this year it boasts the reigning Masters Champion making his first official debut since winning the green jacket. Rory McIlroy and Shane Lowry won the Zurich a year ago and will look to defend their title this year. Rory just so happens to be doing so as someone who has accomplished the career grand slam.

McIlroy has won other times this season as well. In 2025 alone he has won at several people’s dream courses in Pebble Beach, TPC Sawgrass and obviously Augusta. To say his game is in peak form is putting things lightly. He is dancing through wins at some of golf’s most iconic locations.

As weird as this sounds, that idea may have seem farfetched to the McIlroy that showed up at the Zurich a year ago. At that point his game was in a questionable place, relatively speaking, and he was dealing with his personal life getting discussed by the world.

Rory reflected on that on Wednesday and noted how things seem quite different one year later.

Yeah, if you had asked me a year ago if I’d be sitting here in this position and everything that’s happened. But yeah, I honestly could not be in a better place in my life professionally, personally, all of it.

Yeah, it’s amazing what a year can do. Yeah, this tournament last year was a really cool moment for both of us. I think it probably injected a little bit of joy back into golf for me in some way, which I think is really, really important, not to lose that.

Yeah, for me, I had a great year last year, and I think this tournament was sort of the catalyst to the really good golf that I played for the rest of the year.

As far as last season is concerned, Rory had won the Hero Dubai Desert Classic prior to the Zurich with his countryman Shane Lowry. After that win he would go on to also take victory at the Wells Fargo. He notably, perhaps infamously, finished second at Pinehurst during the U.S. Open and capped off his season with a win at the DP World tour Championship in November.

Since then though Rory has been on a tear as noted. In his seven starts across the calendar year since the DP World. Tour title he has the three victories as noted. He has 6 wins in his last 25 starts worldwide, 20 top 15 finishes (including ties) and only a single missed cut. It is astonishing.

Data Golf

You’ll note that this data set begins (bottom of the graphic) with the RBC Heritage the week before last year’s Zurich Classic. It is obviously impossible to speak to Rory’s personal life being in a better place as only he can do so, but from a golf standpoint he is completely right. He has experience an enormous run with the most recent leg being the most seismic across his storied career.

Jonathan Larson wrote in Rent that it is difficult to measure a year and pontificated on measures to do so. It is hard to know exactly how Rory would measure the last 365 days (give or take) in his personal and professional life, but there has clearly been a lot that has happened.

Good for him.