British Open 2024: Among top players missing cut, Rory McIlroy pondered vacation early in second round

Another fruitless major season is over for Rory McIlroy.

Struggling to find fairways and greens in the high winds at Royal Troon, the Irishman didn’t survive the British Open battle into the weekend after shooting four-over-par 75 on Friday. McIlroy got off to a bad start to the tournament with a 78, and his 11-over total was well off the cut line of six over—the highest trim in the tournament in 11 years.

By not reaching the last 36 holes in the final major of the year, McIlroy is guaranteed to not have won any of golf’s four biggest titles in a full decade, his last triumph coming in the 2014 PGA. The disappointment also follows McIlroy’s crushing loss to Bryson DeChambeau last month in the U.S. Open at Pinehurst.

Unlike the occasion of that disappointment, McIlroy did speak briefly with reporters on Friday and said he figured his tournament might be over when he started the second round by going six over through his first six holes, including making an 8 on the par-5 fourth.

“Yeah, I think once I made the 8 on the fourth hole, that was it,” McIlroy said. “Twenty-two holes into the event and I’m thinking about where I’m going to go on vacation next week.”

In analyzing the week, McIlroy said, “When I look back on the two majors that I didn’t play my best at, here and the Masters [where he was T-22], the wind got the better of me on Friday at Augusta, and then the wind got the better of me the last two days here.

“I didn’t adapt well at all to that left-to-right wind yesterday on the back nine, and then this afternoon going out in that gusty wind on the front, as I said, it got the better of me, and I felt pretty uncomfortable over a few shots.”

For McIlroy to come close to winning majors has been routine; him missing cuts is extremely rare. He’s played on the weekend in all but four of the last 23 majors and has missed only three cuts in 15 British Open tries. This cut snapped a streak of 26 straight made overall for McIlroy, dating back to missing the cut in last year’s Masters.

If there is any consolation, the Troon puzzle and conditions were unsolvable to many of the best in the game. Of the top 20 in the World Golf Ranking, half missed the cut, including Ludvig Aberg (nine over), DeChambeau (nine over), Viktor Hovland (six over), Sahith Theegala (14 over), Tommy Fleetwood (nine over), Tony Finau (10 over) and Keegan Bradley (seven over), the recently named captain for the 2025 U.S. Ryder Cup team.

Of course, there also will be the notable absence of Tiger Woods, who shot 77 in the second round, had a 14-over total and missed his third straight major cut of the season after finishing 60th in the Masters. Woods said afterward that he would not play again until the unofficial Hero World Challenge that he hosts.

“I’ve gotten better, even though my results really haven’t shown it, but physically I’ve gotten better, which is great,” Wood said. “I just need to keep progressing like that and then eventually start playing more competitively and start getting into kind of the competitive flow again.”

The two players who made the last Open at Troon such a thriller had mixed results. Henrik Stenson, the 2016 champion, couldn’t recover from his opening 77 and missed the cut at eight over, while his challenger back then, Phil Mickelson, made the weekend with a five-over total. For the 54-year-old Mickelson, it was only the second cut made in his last six major starts.

Is it the British Open or the Open Championship? The name of the final men’s major of the golf season is a subject of continued discussion. The event’s official name, as explained in this op-ed by former R&A chairman Ian Pattinson, is the Open Championship. But since many United States golf fans continue to refer to it as the British Open, and search news around the event accordingly, Golf Digest continues to utilize both names in its coverage.