Rory McIlroy is one of the best golfers in history.
The Northern Irishman completed the career grand slam earlier this year, he’s spent over 100 weeks as the World No. 1, and he’s won 29 PGA Tour events over his illustrious career, which is still going strong.
In fact, you could argue that 2025 has been the most impressive season (at least so far) in McIlroy’s career.
McIlroy has played in 12 individual events on the PGA Tour this season and has three wins, one runner-up, seven top-10 finishes, and has only finished outside the top 20 on two occasions.
His win at the 2025 Masters may go down as the most memorable of his career, but not just because it was the end of a long, winding journey to completing the slam.
That win also showed why McIlroy is such an endearing figure among sports fans. Blessed with an enviable amount of golfing talent, McIlroy shows his human side on the course perhaps more than any of the other all-time greats he’s played against.
While Tiger Woods was like a shark on the course and his contemporary Scottie Scheffler is as stoic as they come, McIlroy is no stranger to seizing up in big moments, succumbing to whatever is going on in his head.
He’s one of us; he just can hit the ball a lot further.
All of this makes McIlroy such a fascinating player to project, especially at major championships. Whether you’re playing in a pool at your local haunt, entering a DFS competition, betting at a sportsbook, or just picking a winner for the sake of it, you need to guess whether Rory McIlroy, one of the best players to ever play the game, will go boom or bust.
That’s just not something you need to do with most all-time greats.
Nobody is going to win every tournament, and every elite golfer will throw up a dud every once in a while, but nobody seems to do it like McIlroy, who also happens to be regularly priced as one of the favorites to win each tournament he enters.
Rory is +750 to win the 2025 Open Championship. Only Scottie Scheffler (+550) has better odds to lift the Claret Jug.
When you look at his results this season, those short odds are completely understandable. And they make even more sense when you consider that McIlroy is one of the most popular figures in all of sports.
He will get a ton of action, so bookmakers know they can charge a bit of a premium on the five-time major champion and still get a lot of action.
BetMGM sportsbook reports McIlroy is their biggest liability. They won’t be alone.
Nobody is going to argue that McIlroy is a sensible pick to win this tournament. He’s one of the best players in the field, he has plenty of experience in these conditions, and he’s coming off a T2 at the Scottish Open last week.
Getting 7.5x on your bet for a player with that kind of resume seems like a decent enough payout. It all seems straightforward enough, right?
But in reality, there’s very little that’s straightforward about McIlroy when he tees off in the tournaments with the brightest lights. That’s the other side of McIlroy, the one that makes him one of the great characters in a sport that needs more of them these days.
We saw that side of the reigning Masters champion at this very course in 2019.
The first time that Royal Portrush hosted the Open Championship since 1951, there was heaps of pressure on McIlroy, the biggest sporting star from Northern Ireland since George Best played for Manchester United in the 1960s and 70s, to win.
He shot a 79 on Thursday.
With the pressure off his shoulders, McIlroy then reverted to his best by shooting a 65 in Round 2, missing the cut by one stroke.
Like his performance on Sunday at the 2025 Masters, you got to see everything that makes McIlroy a beloved sporting icon in one small, compelling sample.
You’d think that the Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of McIlroy’s game would make him an infuriating player to back, but the opposite is true. Gamblers can’t get enough of Rors.
When bettors would flock to bet Tiger Woods at absurdly short prices back in his salad days, they did it because no other player was close to The Big Cat. Nobody was more clutch. There was nothing complicated about betting on Woods.
But for McIlroy, he represents something very different for gamblers. He is, in a lot of ways, what makes betting on sports so much fun.
You want to root for him, you want to be a part of the ride when he wins, and, if you’re being honest with yourself, there’s also a part of you that wants to feel the angst of having action on McIlroy as he steps up to address the ball for a 3-foot putt only to watch the 99-percenter lip out.
You both look up to the gods. You can’t believe it, but this is exactly what you and many others like you signed up for.
There’s nobody else in sports who can take you on that kind of ride.
Michael Leboff is a long-suffering Islanders fan, but a long-profiting sports bettor with 10 years of experience in the gambling industry. He loves using game theory to help punters win bracket pools, find long shots, and learn how to beat the market in mainstream and niche sports.