NEW ORLEANS — Rory McIlroy is on the TPC Louisiana 19th green stage with a beer in one hand and a microphone in the other. He’s got Mardi Gras beads around his neck standing next to one of his best friends, Shane Lowry, and the drunken New Orleans crowd keeps chanting.

“Rory! Rory! Rory!”

“Do you know any songs from the 80s?” the bandleader asks.

And then Journey starts playing.

The four-time major champ belted out “Don’t Stop Believing” early Sunday evening, tossing his head back to put his chest into the notes. Lowry just laughed and drank his beer watching his buddy make a fool of himself. As he walked off moments later, Lowry answered why he didn’t join — “I would have sung much better.”

McIlroy just won a golf tournament. And he needed to win a golf tournament. But far, far more than he needed anything on a scorecard, he needed this week. McIlroy needed to have fun.

This is not a drill. Rory McIlroy singing Don’t Stop Believing pic.twitter.com/y5PkEDoqo4

— Brody Miller (@BrodyAMiller) April 28, 2024

This all began with a “really drunken lunch” after their Ryder Cup win last fall. McIlroy asked Lowry if they could team up for the Zurich Classic — the PGA Tour’s only team event. Lowry has played this event before but, fearful of rejection, never asked McIlroy to team up. McIlroy sent Lowry a Christmastime text confirming. He was coming to New Orleans.

Fast forward to Saturday night, and just off Bourbon Street in the French Quarter at a classic white tablecloth Creole joint called Arnaud’s, McIlroy and Lowry received a standing ovation from the other diners. This isn’t even some casual weekend in Louisiana. It’s Jazz Fest. It’s NFL Draft week. The Pelicans are in the playoffs. Yet the people were so psyched to have the No. 2 player in the world they filled TPC Louisiana with the largest galleries anyone can recall and applauded them at restaurants. One TV reporter joked the last athlete to receive that was Reggie Bush nearly two decades ago.

“It was weird for me,” Lowry said. “That stuff doesn’t happen to me.”

“It doesn’t happen to me, either!” McIlroy joked.

“He’s getting old,” Lowry said with a cheeky grin. “But he can still move the needle a little bit.  Rory brings a crowd, and people love him.”

A little context. McIlroy isn’t having a very good season. It became a running gag last week that Scottie Scheffler’s caddie, Ted Scott, is outearning McIlroy in 2024. And McIlroy has been having a stressful few years. He was the face of the PGA Tour in its war with LIV and the most public-facing policy board member. Then, he got blindsided by the PGA Tour entering into a framework agreement with the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia (LIV’s owners), calling himself a “sacrificial lamb” as they sent him to speak to the media the next day.

He then reportedly lost a power battle over the future of the tour to Patrick Cantlay and decided to leave the board, with Sports Illustrated reporting Cantlay and others like Tiger Woods and Jordan Spieth focused more on catering to the tour’s elites. McIlroy then changed his tune and campaigned for unification with LIV. He rubbed people the wrong way, criticizing Spieth publicly for saying the PGA Tour didn’t “need” the Saudis. He consistently made comments about the desire for money ruining the sport. He got in an awkward incident at the Players Championship with playing partners Spieth and Viktor Hovland.

Oh, and the golf has suffered. It’s all relative. He’s still top 30 nearly every week, but has just one PGA Tour finish better than 19th all season. When he finished T22 at the Masters two weeks ago, he got questions about whether he needed to blow up his swing and do a full reset.

Then, he went to New Orleans.

McIlroy was not locked in this week, at least not for most of the week. This week was about having fun with his old buddy Shane. They didn’t even practice when they got in Tuesday because the course was too busy, so they messed around at the chipping green instead. During the Wednesday Pro-Am, they hardly even played every other shot. They seemed to hit when they felt like it while walking and talking the rest. They crushed chargrilled oysters from Drago’s on the 10th hole and teased each other.

Who knows how worried they even were as they entered the seventh hole Sunday five back of the leaders. Yes, they’re competitors and want to win, but they were just going with the flow.

Then, McIlroy got hot. Playing alternate shot, they birdied four of the next five holes to get one back. McIlroy dropped a saucy little club twirl that he hasn’t shown in years on a perfect iron shot on 14. And right around that time, he clearly started to want it a bit more. When he put his drive on 16 into a bunker, he bent over and held his head down for a full minute in frustration.

But no worries. Lowry hit a perfect wedge from the bunker to the center of the green, and McIlroy hit a wide-breaking putt to take a share of the lead.

On the par-3 17th, Lowry’s tee shot flew into the crowd and he later missed a tough par putt. He was visibly disappointed with himself, but McIlroy speedily chased him off the green to say, “Hey, Shane. That was a good putt.”

“Rory is there backing me up this week,” Lowry said, “and he was a great teammate, and he made me believe in myself. It was good to have him there to do that.”

They then birdied 18 to send it to a playoff, and thanks to a missed putt by Martin Trainer in the playoff, McIlroy won his 25th PGA Tour tournament and Lowry earned himself a spot in the remaining PGA Tour signature events. Teamwork.

Yeah, maybe McIlroy was the key to the win this week, but there’s a chance Lowry was the key to a much-needed week for McIlroy. Because he admitted this week was about getting away from the stress.

“Absolutely,” he said. “The reason that Shane and I both started to play golf is because we thought it was fun at some stage in our life.  I think sort of reinjecting a little bit of that fun back into it in a week like this week, it can always help.”

And as the event finished, tournament organizers could be seen celebrating the coup of one of the game’s biggest stars winning and possibly coming back next year to defend his title. This isn’t exactly one of the tour’s bigger events. They’d kill for McIlroy in the field again. So he was asked, “Has anyone started trying to sell you on returning?”

“I don’t think they need to try,” McIlroy said. “I think we’re coming back.”

(Top photo: Chris Graythen / Getty Images)

With Tom Brady recently saying he’s “not opposed” to another NFL return, New England Patriots first-year head coach Jerod Mayo was asked if he could see his former teammate returning to his old team. 

Mayo is all for Brady returning, but he’s thinking more along the lines of coaching – not playing quarterback. 

“I love Tom, and the door is always open if he wants to come in here and coach,” Mayo told WEEI Radio. “But as far as going on the field, I don’t know. But if he comes here, once again, going back to the, ‘Hey, the best player will play,’ you’ve gotta come in here and compete, and he loves competition. I doubt he’s gonna be walking through these doors any time soon.”

Brady made an appearance on “DeepCut” with barber VicBlends, where he discussed the possibility of once again coming out of retirement. 

“I’m not opposed to it,” he said. “I don’t know if they are going to let me if I become an owner of an NFL team. I’m always going to be in good shape. I’ll always be able to throw the ball. So, to come in for a little bit, like [Michael Jordan] coming back, I don’t know if they would let me. But I wouldn’t be opposed to it.”

TOM BRADY SHARES ‘BIGGEST PROBLEM’ WITH YOUNGER GENERATION ‘IT’S ALL ABOUT THEM’

Brady is trying to become a minority owner of the Las Vegas Raiders, which has been known for quite some time. 

But, if Brady were to come back, it likely won’t be with the Patriots due to what they want to achieve with the quarterback position heading into the 2024 season. 

Tom Brady made an appearance on “DeepCut,” where he discussed the possibility of once again coming out of retirement. (Jose Breton/Pics Action/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

With Bill Belichick no longer head coach, the Patriots’ new era involved drafting a potential franchise quarterback in North Carolina’s Drake Maye at No. 3 overall. 

New England hopes Maye could be Brady-esque and usher in another winning generation under Mayo, and he’ll likely get the chance to start that in 2024. 

The Patriots put a crowded room around him, though, as veteran Jacoby Brissett comes back into the building as the likely backup. Bailey Zappe, who has spelled Mac Jones as the starter for the past couple seasons, remains in place, while Nathan Rourke and 2024 sixth-round pick Joe Milton are also on the roster. 

Linebackers coach Jerod Mayo of the New England Patriots before a game against the Raiders at Allegiant Stadium on Oct. 15, 2023, in Las Vegas. (Chris Unger/Getty Images)

New England will always be the home of Brady and six of his seven Super Bowl rings. But the quarterback position is no longer his to run in Foxborough.   

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On the surface, it might not have looked like much of a slump.

To star Dodgers slugger Freddie Freeman, however, his performance through much of April was certainly starting to feel like one.

Entering play Monday, Freeman was batting .306 with eight doubles, two home runs and 19 RBIs. He had a .861 on-base-plus-slugging percentage and 142 OPS+ (meaning, essentially, he has been 42% more productive than the average MLB hitter).

Those were drops from his first two seasons in L.A., in which he finished top-five in MVP voting both times.

But a slump? Really?

“I take pride in being consistent,” Freeman said. “And I’m not being consistent right now.”

That, at least, was what Freeman was feeling two weeks ago, in the midst of an eight-for-47 stretch that dropped his batting average to .259.

“I’m not hitting the pitches I’d normally hit,” Freeman said then. “There’s a lot going on up there. Trying to figure it out.”

There are points in every season where Freeman cools off, and his precise swing mechanics get out of whack. Almost always, it’s because his hips rotate too open, and his bat cuts short and across the strike zone — not square and straight through it.

The result: Freeman will stop hitting fastballs for opposite-field line drives, or barrel up breaking pitches into the right-center field gap. Instead, he will hit lazy pop-flys, or yank a ground ball to the pull side, or simply foul off mistake pitches he’d typically clobber.

“I’m not swinging at bad pitches,” Freeman said, at the height of his early-season struggles. “I’m just not hitting them where they should be going.”

The fix: A curated routine of slump-busting pregame techniques; especially a signature “net drill” in which Freeman will set up about an arm’s distance from a batting screen, then try to execute a swing without brushing the barrel against, hoping to recalibrate the inside-out bat path that has long been key to his career .301 batting average.

“I usually only bring it out 5-10 times per year,” Freeman said of the drill, which he has been doing since he was a kid. “That’s usually when things are really off.”

This year, Freeman dusted it off early, one of several notable alterations he has made to his meticulous pregame process.

In recent weeks, the 34-year-old has also started taking almost daily rounds of outdoor batting practice, a rarity during his first two years with the Dodgers (he typically prefers to hit in the clubhouse batting cages).

Overall, he has increased his total amount of pregame swings three-fold, he said, “just to hurry this [process] up.”

Lately, at last, better results have started to follow.

Freeman entered Monday on an eight-game hitting streak, going 12 for his last 27 with 11 RBIs and more extra-base hits (five) than strikeouts (four).

Half of those games have been multi-hits efforts. And in all but one, he has recorded a hit either up the middle or the other way — a telltale sign of synced-up mechanics in his swing.

“Everything’s kind of been working,” Freeman said. “Just been kind of doing really really slow, soft swings in BP, and then let the adrenaline of the game take the swing a little bit harder. Things the last week have been a lot better.”

It’s a welcome sight for the Dodgers, who haven’t often seen their $162 million first baseman struggle since arriving in March 2022.

“He’s gonna come out of it,” manager Dave Roberts said this weekend. “But there’s some sadness when he’s in a dark place.”

Phrases like “sadness” and “dark place” might not square with Freeman’s actual numbers.

Even at his recent low point, when a three-game hitting drought culminated with a three-strikeout performance on April 19, Freeman’s production was still comfortably above league average.

Even as he battled inconsistency at the plate, he still wore a perpetual smile, joking around with coaches and teammates.

“Sometimes players are in a dark spot and they really feel it and mean it,” Roberts said. “But Freddie knows he’s a great hitter … So I think he has some levity with it.”

Indeed, when asked last week if he was being superstitious by changing his hitting routine, Freeman referenced a line from Steve Carell’s character in “The Office,” Michael Scott.

“Just a little stitious,” he responded.

When told, jokingly, this weekend, he must be the worst .300 hitter in baseball, Freeman chuckled and shrugged.

“Feels like it,” he said.

Still, the reason this slump felt different, why the frustration was boiling much closer to the surface, is because it came on the heels of similar struggles last fall.

At the end of the 2023 regular season, Freeman batted just .262 over his final 17 games (a notable drop from his .339 average before then). Then, in the Dodgers’ postseason sweep to the Arizona Diamondbacks, his swing seemed completely off, resulting in a one-for-10 mark that loomed large in the Dodgers’ early elimination.

“That’s why there has been so much frustration,” Freeman said earlier this month. “Because I know what I’m doing wrong. It’s over-rotation with my hips, which causes [other issues]. It’s the same thing every time. But for some reason, I’ve gone through everything about 20 times already and it hasn’t clicked yet. So that’s why, here I am, hitting outside, doing little things differently, [trying to] smile through it.”

Finally, over the last week, it seems like the tide has started to turn.

In addition to his eight-game hitting streak, Freeman snapped another kind of drought on Sunday, hammering his first home run since the Dodgers’ home opener exactly a month earlier.

“No,” Freeman said when asked if he was worried about adding to his home run total, after it’d been stuck at one for 26 games. “If you’re just going for power when you don’t have a good swing already, it’s just never going to happen.”

But now, thanks to a laborious swing progression and trust in his hitting process, the moment offered the latest sign of Freeman’s continued turnaround; that an elongated (for him, at least) slump to start the season finally appears to be largely done.

“There’s still bad swings in there,” Freeman said, “but ultimately there have been a lot more good swings lately.”