It’s been a decade since Rory McIlroy won the PGA Championship. But the Northern Irishman is back at Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville, Kentucky, and will begin his pursuit of a third career Wanamaker Trophy.

But McIlroy’s personal life was thrust into the spotlight when he filed for divorce from his wife, Erica Stoll, this week. 

The four-time major winner held a pre-tournament press conference on Wednesday, but before he took any questions from the reporters, the moderator made it clear that McIlroy would not take any questions about his pending divorce.

“I believe you all saw the statement yesterday from Rory’s communication team specifically that he will not be making any additional comments on his private life, so thank you all for respecting his wishes,” the moderator said at the beginning of McIlroy’s media availability.

MAJOR CHAMPIONS RORY MCILROY, LUCAS GLOVER REACT TO JIMMY DUNNE’S RESIGNATION FROM PGA POLICY BOARD

The statement the moderator referred to was released by McIlroy’s camp on Tuesday. The statement noted that the pro golfer “will not be making any further comment” and “stressed Rory’s desire to ensure this difficult time is as respectful and amicable as possible.”

Rory McIlroy and his wife, Erica, are shown after the singles matches on the final day of the 2023 Ryder Cup at Marco Simone Golf and Country Club in Rome. (Brendan Moran/Sportsfile via Getty Images)

The media session proceeded to focus almost exclusively on McIlroy’s golf game and topics surrounding the second major of the year. At one point, McIlroy was asked about how he was doing on a personal level, but the 35-year-old replied, “I am ready to play this week.”

Rory McIlroy plays the ninth hole during the first round of the Wells Fargo Championship at Quail Hollow Country Club on May 9, 2024, in Charlotte, North Carolina. (Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images)

The press conference did go longer than expected, with McIlroy fielding questions from the podium for around 20 minutes. 

McIlroy appears to remain laser focused, even in the midst of some personal turmoil. McIlroy and Stoll have been married for the past seven years and share a 3-year-old daughter. McIlroy was spotted going through practice rounds before Wednesday’s media session, but his ring was noticeably missing.

McIlroy finished in a tie for 22nd place at the Masters Tournament in April, but he has since won the last two tournaments he has competed in: the Zurich Classic and Wells Fargo Championship.

Last week, McIlroy told Golf.com that he tends to “play very good golf whenever I have a lot of stuff going on.”

“I’ve always been able to compartmentalize pretty well. I seem to, for whatever reason, play very good golf whenever I have a lot of stuff going on. I don’t know if it’s – I need that just to really – when I get on the course, really focus on what I’m doing out there. But yeah, it seems to work,” he said.

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Luke Schultz picked a perfect time to shoot his lowest score.

The Palisades High junior shot a four-under par 68, including an eagle on No. 18 that forced a playoff, then sank an eight-footer for birdie on the sixth playoff hole to beat Isiah Kim of Van Nuys and win the City Section individual golf championship Wednesday afternoon at Griffith Park’s Harding Course.

“I’ve hit that same putt from that exact distance a thousand times,” Schultz said. “Same old putt and the same result. My personal best was a 74 here and today I shoot 68. Can’t explain. There’s no rhyme or reason to why I shot what I did today. Putts were just falling.”

No putt was bigger than the one Schultz curved in from 15 feet on his third shot at the par-five 18th to catch clubhouse leader Kim, who ultimately had to settle for the runner-up medal for the second straight year, having carded a one-under to finish one shot behind Granada Hills’ Jahan Battu last spring.

Playing in the first group alongside Granada Hills’ Joseph Wong, who was fourth a year ago, Kim pulled off the shot off the day after driving the green on the 17th hole. He drained a 75-foot eagle putt to take a two-stroke lead after Wong had pulled even with a birdie at one-under with a birdie at 16. Kim then birdied the 18th to give himself a seemingly safe cushion.

“It was a double breaker from the back of the green that started to the right, came back left, then came back right,” Kim said. “ I had zero intention of making that putt. It was 100% about speed. I hit it a little harder than I wanted. so when it dropped I just froze and was like ‘Did that really just happen?’ ”

After bogeying the first hole, Kim parred the next five before back-to-back-to-back birdies at seven, eight and nine. Kim bogeyed No. 13 but shooting three under on the last two holes left him waiting nervously to see what Schultz would finish, several groups behind.

Several foursomes were still on the course when Kin and Schultz returned to the 18th tee box to begin a sudden death playoff. Both made short birdie putts and headed to the 17th, where Schultz had to blast out of a bad lie on his second shot with his opponent safely on the green. He eventually saved par and watched as Kim’s title-clinching putt stopped an inch short of the cup.

“There are so many par fours and par fives at my home course at Mountaingate,” Schultz said. “The key shot was that second time that we played 17 when I had a 30-yard chip that was all dirt and I told myself to choke down on the club and I pulled it off.”

They returned to No. 18 for the third playoff hole, where Schultz again scrambled after an errant drive landed right of the cart path. The fourth and fifth playoff holes were at No. 17 and on the fourth, Kim extended the match with a clutch birdie putt from 12 feet after Schultz had rolled in a 17-footer moments before.

They returned to No. 18 for the sixth extra hole and this time Kim hooked his tee shot into the weeds next to the fairway. He chipped back onto the green but it gave Schultz the slim opening he needed to win the title.

Wong finished third after birdies on two of the last three holes, but afterward he lamented a few missed opportunities. “I lost a lot of strokes with my putting, I had three three-putts and I had a birdie at 16 to get back in contention but I three-putted 17 and Isiah had that amazing eagle so that was that.”

Schultz’s marathon effort also helped Palisades secure its 23rd team crown and third in the last four years with a 10-stroke triumph over defending champion Granada Hills.

And so, on May 14, 2024, modern Premier League football reached its logical next step: Tottenham Hotspur fans rooting against their team when facing Manchester City because they’d rather lose than have rivals Arsenal win the title.

First of all, this is in no way a criticism of the fans who chose to do that. Doing so is entirely their choice and to anyone suggesting what they did was irrational: well, have you met a football fan? There’s also an extent to which this would have happened in any era given how intrinsic schadenfreude has always been to the football fan experience.

But while much of the chatter on this topic before the game centred on the rights and wrongs of wanting your team to lose, maybe that was slightly missing the point.

Rather than telling fans how to feel, perhaps we should think about how it is that we’ve ended up with a situation where celebrating rivals’ misfortune is pretty much the maximum most teams’ fans can aspire to each season. Yes, laughing at your rivals has always been a big part of being a football supporter, but it becomes a problem when that’s pretty much the only part of being a football supporter.

City, cheered on by their own fans and plenty of Spurs ones, beat Tottenham 2-0 in Tuesday’s game. They will likely win their fourth Premier League title in a row on Sunday. No team in English football history has won four consecutive titles.

This is an unprecedented period of dominance and, in that context, it’s unsurprising that supporters of other clubs have to find their enjoyment in whatever way they can.

And it’s not just the Premier League — City tend to hoover up the domestic cups as well. In the past decade, only seven English clubs have won a major trophy (the Premier League, domestic cups or one of the three European cups). In the previous decade (2005 to 2014), that number was 10. It was 10 from 1995-2004, too, and 13 from 1985-1994.

Essentially, it’s getting harder and harder for non-elite clubs to win anything, let alone the Premier League. Though an honourable mention for Watford, who nearly added to that tally of seven when they reached the FA Cup final in 2019… a final they lost 6-0 to Manchester City.

Manchester City’s Ruben Dias celebrates with team-mate Stefan Ortega at the end of Tuesday’s game (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)

Spurs, a much bigger club than Watford and a member of the Premier League’s ‘Big Six’, have not won a trophy for 16 years. City can’t be blamed for that — they didn’t emerge as a major force until a few years after — but that was the context for the weird situation that developed in the lead-up to Tuesday’s game and then festered during it.

The Spurs head coach, Ange Postecoglou, was irritated by the discourse before the game, saying he’d never understand not wanting your team to win, and he was raging about it after.

“Of course it does,” Postecoglou said when asked if the strange, subdued atmosphere affected the players against City. “It is what it is. I can’t dictate what people do. They’re allowed to express themselves in any way they want. But yeah, when we’ve got late winners in games, it’s because the crowd’s helped us.”

The Spurs fans weren’t hostile towards their own team and many cheered as normal, but it was a very different atmosphere from a standard big game and the City goals were followed by chants about Arsenal.

A small number of supporters did City’s “Poznan” celebration after they had taken the lead and a few wore Tottenham’s old light-blue away kit to show where their loyalties lay. Video footage emerged of Postecoglou arguing with a supporter on Tuesday night, who it’s been said was celebrating one of the City goals. On Saturday, on the way back from the 2-1 win over Burnley, some Spurs fans were singing the City anthem, “Blue Moon”.

The weirder thing in all of this is not how much Spurs fans wanted to revel in Arsenal’s misfortune — that’s totally to be expected — but how little feeling City engender in rival fans. As the dominant team in English football, one would expect them to evoke a mixture of hatred and begrudging admiration. As Manchester United and Liverpool once did. Instead, there’s generally a numbness towards City or, often, actually an appreciation for the useful role they perform in denying teams that fans of rival clubs actually care about.

When you take a step back, the situation is strange. A league that prides itself on competitiveness will almost certainly, by Sunday, have been won by the same team for the last four years and six of the last seven. Oh, and that same team is facing 115 charges for alleged breaches of Premier League rules (which they deny).

But is that team hated, or even disliked? Nah, not really. No one really has the energy or can conceive of an alternative. City winning the league is just what happens. To be bothered by it would be like getting annoyed by the colour of the sky, or complaining that there are only seven days in the week.

Tottenham’s players show their frustration during their 2-0 loss to City (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)

It’s such a weird situation that, inevitably, there will be collateral damage from time to time for people who are new to it. Like Postecoglou on Tuesday, who was furious at what he perceives to be a parochial, small-time mentality of those inside and outside the club who favoured self-sabotage over progress against City.

“I think the last 48 hours has revealed to me that the foundations are fairly fragile, mate,” he said, before adding pointedly: “What other people, how they want to feel, and what their priorities are, are of zero interest to me.”

Postecoglou is desperate to compete with City, but with Pep Guardiola in charge and the current ownership in place, how realistic is that? As Arsenal and Liverpool have found out, you can do all the right things and you’ll still almost always fall short. So the general feeling is by all means go for it but, in the meantime, fans of most clubs take their kicks when they can get them.

It was almost forgotten in the local rivalry psychodrama that Spurs would have had a decent chance of qualifying for the Champions League if they’d beaten City on Tuesday night. But even that prospect has left a lot of fans cold over the last few months, with many feeling that there’s little point qualifying for a competition you have no real chance of winning.

And so to the final day of the Premier League season, which will naturally be hyped up, even though everyone knows the chances of much drama are minimal.

There were genuine laughs in the press room on Tuesday night when Sky Sports tried to big up the last round of games and the potential for a thrilling finish. City last lost in the league in December and aside from games against their title rivals Arsenal and Liverpool, have dropped two Premier League points in 2024.

Their record-breaking fourth title will be met largely with indifference by the rest of the country. Aside from the relief that Spurs fans feel that Arsenal haven’t won the title; just how Everton and other supporters felt two years ago when it was Liverpool denied by City on the final day.

Those emotions are about as good as it gets for most supporters in 2024 and while, to some extent, it’s ever been thus, it’s never quite been like this.

(Top photo: Julian Finney/Getty Images)