I was trying to think, watching the Fedex Cup on Sunday Night, what the criteria you would use to answer the question of who Ireland’s greatest ever sportsperson might be. There are obviously any number of variables you could toss into the equation: Some people might argue for a GAA legend, of which there are many to pick from, but the weakness there is that GAA legends only ever compete against other Irish people, and that’s a small pond. So, while someone like Pat Spillane or John Joe O’Reilly or even Jack Lynch might have a case based on their honours over the course of a career, the fact is that they didn’t take on the world.
Someone like Sonia O’Sullivan did, of course, take on the world, and regularly beat it. The same is true of many Olympians. But OIympians suffer from another problem: a lack of consistency. Winning once or twice is great but winning at a high level consistently is another thing.
So, what about, say, Roy Keane? He, and other soccer greats like John Giles, did take on the world, and win, and do so regularly. The problem there is that soccer is a team sport. Would “Keano” be remembered as a legend if he’d played his whole career at Everton, instead of Manchester United? I’m not so sure. Eddie Irvine has long been a favourite of mine, as the only Irishman to win a Formula One race, but that was a career that was exceptional by Irish standards, not by world standards.
What about Eoghan Morgan? The only Irishman ever to captain a team to a world cup win? He probably loses out because the team was England, and the sport was Cricket. You’re not going to have an easy time defending his claim in a Dublin pub, alas.
Rory McIlroy now, he ticks a lot of boxes. Golf is very much an individual game. He doesn’t owe his success to other golfers playing with him. He performs consistently: 34 career wins, 22 of them on the gold standard US PGA tour, and 4 major championships. He plays at the highest level of his sport, against some of the greatest golfers ever to have lived.
And ironically, McIlroy probably suffers because his frankly astonishing success isn’t enough: He has the talent to win every tournament he enters, but he often has off-days. Those of us who watch Golf know them all too well: The days when a four-foot putt looks as difficult as a forty-footer. The days when you hide your eyes behind your hands when he takes out the driver. Four majors, but not a single one since 2014.
This weekend, though, he underlined his claim, I think. A frankly astonishing comeback from, at one stage, ten shots behind to claim a third FedEx Cup victory, and with it an $18 million cash prize. He played golf of unanswerable quality against the 30 best players on the PGA tour, in a tournament where multiple players were given a head start over him. The very best golfers in the world simply could not live with him.
If you judge the question of “who the greatest is” based on these criteria – level of competition, longevity, individual contribution to victory, and overall success – I don’t think there’s another Irishman or woman who comes close. Ask the average American to name an Irish sportsman, and you’ll get one of two answers: McIlroy, or McGregor.
In terms of fame, those two are on about par. But McGregor doesn’t come close to McIlroy’s level of success, and much of his fame is, eh, more about personality than performance.
That leaves us, of course, with the final objection often raised to McIlroy: That he might be one of them. I need not elaborate, for you know who I mean. Is he even really Irish? He carries, after all, a British passport, and though raised Roman Catholic, has never identified solely as Irish. Wikipedia says of him that he is “reluctant to discuss his nationality”. For good reason, I would have thought. But by the laws of the Republic, and the Good Friday Agreement, he is as Irish as I am, or you are. There should be no controversy about this, though some still try to make one. He represented Ireland at the Olympics, not Britain, though frankly he’d have been within his rights to do either.
Anyway, we should consider ourselves privileged to be able to watch him. For me, there’s only one answer to the question posed in the headline. Nobody else, at the end of the day, comes close.