In the end, the final round of The Masters was not the Rory McIlroy versus Bryson DeChambeau battle everyone expected.
The clash of the titans was quickly replaced by McIlroy’s wrestles with himself, Augusta National and eventually Justin Rose, as DeChambeau repeatedly pulled his irons left.
The night before the pair met in the final group at a major for the first time, the anticipation was clear that it would be a new chapter in golf’s latest great rivalry.
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DeChambeau won the first round at the US Open.
But there was so many more layers to it than McIlroy’s Pinehurst nightmare.
PGA Tour versus LIV Golf.
An avid historian, a traditionalist against someone pushing the boundaries and exploring new horizons.
A European versus an American.
But when DeChambeau pulled his approach into the pond left of the 11th green, it felt like cold water had been poured on the burning flame between them.
The theatre was no less captivating for the rest of the round with McIlroy fighting his own demons, Rose rattling off birdies and the likes of Ludvig Aberg, Patrick Reed and Scottie Scheffler even daring to make a charge.
But just when everyone thought the McIlroy versus DeChambeau rivalry had faded into the background, it was once again thrust into centre stage.
“Didn’t talk to me once all day,” DeChambeau said of McIlroy, visibly annoyed, during his post-round interview.
“He was just like – just being focused, I guess. It’s not me, though.”
Boom, controversy created.
McIlroy had pulled a move out of his good friend Tiger Woods’ playbook.
Ignore your opponent. Give them nothing.
Be ruthless. This is not a practice round on a Tuesday. This is Masters Sunday.
EVERY shot from Rory McIlroy’s back nine | 15:11
Word spread quickly around Augusta National that DeChambeau was peeved, so McIlroy was asked about his decision to stay silent towards DeChambeau in his press conference.
The new champion swatted it away by saying that he was purely focused on himself.
“It’s such a battle in your head of trying to stay in the present moment and hit this next shot good and hit the next shot good,” McIlroy said. “My battle was with myself.
“It wasn’t with anyone else. You know, at the end there, it was with Justin [Rose], but my battle today was with my mind and staying in the present. I’d like to say that I did a better job of it than I did. It was a struggle, but I got it over the line.
“I’ve rode my luck all week. Again, I think with the things that I’ve had to endure over the last few years, I think I deserved it!”
But now that McIlroy has banished his Augusta demons, a new narrative must emerge.
He said so much himself by starting his winner’s press conference with a question of his own for the press pack.
“What are we going to talk about next year?” he said with a laugh and a massive of grin.
Well, the time may be right for the focus to shift from individuals to their rivalries.
The men’s professional golf merry-go-round does not stop just because the Northern Irishman finally got his green jacket and became the sixth ever male to complete the career grand slam.
In exactly a month from now, there is the first round of the next major to be played, the PGA Championship at Quail Hollow.
It is a course that McIlroy has won at just a casual four times on during the annual PGA Tour stop in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Throw in that he has finished runner-up the last two US Opens, and this year’s Open Championship being played in his home country — at Royal Portrush where, 20 years ago, he set the course record that will never be beaten because of a redesign since, with a 61 as a teenage amateur — and you can understand why McIlroy was cheekily optimistic about his prospects.
“You can’t win all four majors in a year if you haven’t won the first one,” he said with a chuckle and a smirk.
But bubbling away in the background at each of those tournaments is going to be the rivalry between McIlroy and DeChambeau.
Golf fans hope it can emulate the contests Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson used to captivate galleries and audiences with.
Adding to the tension is going to be that DeChambeau needs to be on his game in the next three majors to ensure that the most hostile meeting between the pair of the year does in fact take place.
Following the Masters, McIlroy tops the European Ryder Cup rankings by a long way and is all but certain to be at Bethpage Black in New York in September.
DeChambeau meanwhile is fourth in the US standings.
The top six after the PGA Tour’s BMW Championship in August automatically qualify for the team, but DeChambeau has the disadvantage of only having the majors to earn points.
He is the only LIV player among the US top 12 at present, and needs to play well at Quail Hollow, Oakmont and Royal Portrush to guarantee he makes a return in the red, while and blue after not being selected in Rome two years ago.
DeChambeau will not want to leave his fate in the hands of US captain Keegan Bradley, and that only adds to the drama for the remainder of the year.
The next three majors would be clever to group them together in the opening two rounds for the sake of attracting massive galleries and television audiences, but the most interesting meeting of them all would be at Bethpage Black.
Bradley and his European counterpart Luke Donald would surely have a sense of theatre to pair them together in a Sunday singles showdown.
It would be the ultimate drama, and it would turn the tables back in DeChambeau’s favour.
As well as McIlroy’s silent treatment, he did not cope well with the fact the Augusta crowd were not on his side.
He walked to the first tee, through the patrons, high-fiving them all the way, hyping them up to harness their enthusiasm into his own game, and to get them on side early.
But it did not work.
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Like at Wimbledon in tennis or Lords in cricket, apart from when an English wicketkeeper batter walks out of his crease prematurely, the crowd at Augusta National are traditional, and well in tune with the history of the game.
Most of them headed down Magnolia Lane on Sunday wanting to witness McIlroy join the game’s greats as not only a Masters, but a career grand slam, champion.
That is why they roared louder for McIlroy, and it bothered DeChambeau.
He walked with slumped shoulders, and his head down as if he was seemingly hard done by.
It stood in stark contract to last year at Pinehurst where a parochial crowd backed the American over the European, and he thrived.
He walked with his chest puffed out, his head high and strutted across the fairway with supreme confidence.
The two-time US Open champion will be itching to experience the same again in New York when only those who have flown across the Atlantic will be cheering for McIlroy.
He will also be itching to extract to some revenge as DeChambeau prides himself on being a game-changing, intelligent golfer.
He studies the ins and outs of the golf swing and the various intricacies of the game to the nth degree.
The 31-year-old cracks the YouTube, TikTok and Instagram algorithms.
Speaking to the younger generation with his videos of him practising celebrations in the gyms, or attempting to make a hole-in-one over his house, or trying to break 50 in a scramble from the front tees with US President Trump.
And he will be hating that his complaining about, and being rattled by, a simple trick in McIlroy’s silence has perhaps made him look a little stupid.
“If Bryson thought that he was going to be chatty, chatty with Rory, that was never going to happen,” four-time major champion Dame Laura Davies told the Sky Sports Golf podcast.
“Rory probably went to the course yesterday morning thinking that this is going to be hard work. He [DeChambeau] is going to be revving the galleries up and I don’t want to be too pally-pally with this guy because it’s going to work against me.
“If he’s revving up the crowd and then saying ‘oh, what did you have for breakfast?’, then that doesn’t work in that dynamic. I think Rory not talking to him was a very clever point and it sounds like it got to him, so one-up Rory!”
Also on the Sky Sports Golf podcast, former European Tour player Nick Dougherty, who finished tied seventh at the 2007 US Open, said that DeChambeau is “as mad as a wasp” over the silent treatment saga.
“Every good journalist knows there’s a good time sometimes to get a grab, and that was a good time for Bryson,” Dougherty said.
“The demeanour, the things he was saying. I think they knew and he was ready to go, because he isn’t naive enough to realise that that is absolutely the game plan.
“Why would I want to, as Rory McIlroy, engage with the guy that’s going to try and ride this gallery and rile them up in the way that he does?
“Not to be unfair, because he gets this energy from the crowd like he did it at Pinehurst No. 2, but he couldn’t do it there. I think where it was lopsided to Bryson at Pinehurst in the US Open, but it wasn’t here [Augusta] as the favourite was McIlroy.
“In what world is Rory going to be treating it like ‘yeah, let’s get a nice little chat going here‘? As he said with Bob Rotella, he’s blocking out the noise, staying in his lane, he’s taking the energy down. That was his job, and you don’t do that by having a chat with a guy that’s up here.
“That took all of his energy. There was nothing spare there yesterday that he couldn’t put into all of the things he sits and works with his team on, focusing on, to allow him to just be able to play the golf in a cauldron of pressure that’s unrivalled.”
DeChambeau took to social media to try prove there is no bad blood in the wash up, by offering his compliments to his playing partner.
“Huge congratulations to Rory on an incredible achievement in completing the career Grand Slam of golf,” DeChambeau wrote. “He deserved to get this one.”
But there is a clearly a feeling of angst below the surface, and it should rise at some stage.
The question is purely when, and thankfully for golf fans, with three majors and a Ryder Cup in the next months, the wait should not be long.
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