

AUGUSTA, Ga. — Rory McIlroy will be out of office and not available for meetings for a bit.
McIlroy was expected to travel home to Jupiter, Fla., on Monday, a day after winning the Masters in a dramatic, chaotic playoff that thrilled the sports world. It was the culmination of so many things for McIlroy, most notably a decade-plus toiling away at winning the final leg of the career Grand Slam. He’ll forever be a Masters champion, wear the green jacket and have the invitation to the Champions Dinner, perhaps the last room in golf where he was not allowed. The scene on the 18th green, of McIlroy falling to his knees as emotions overwhelmed him, will live on forever.
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He’s earned the break.
“I’ll probably head home to Florida tomorrow,” McIlroy said Sunday night at the champions press conference. “I’d really love to see my mum and dad. They are back in Northern Ireland. So maybe a trip back home at some point next week.”
But when will he play again on the PGA Tour?
This week, the tour is in Hilton Head Island, S.C., for the RBC Heritage, a signature event with a $20 million purse. With that kind of money on the line, most tour pros would at least attempt to show up and collect a share of the paycheck — Scottie Scheffler did after winning his second Masters in 2024, won the tournament and took home another $3.6 million for his troubles. But McIlroy has not been above skipping even signature events if he didn’t care for the course or the spot on the calendar. He was never signed up to play RBC Heritage, so it’s not like he is withdrawing from it after the Masters win.
This means that the next time McIlroy is likely to play is the Zurich Classic in New Orleans from April 24-27. At first, it would seem like an easy skip — it’s a team event with a much lower purse ($9.2 million) than the Heritage.
But when McIlroy played it for the first time in 2024, with buddy Shane Lowry in a scheme apparently cooked up in a boozy post-Ryder Cup brunch, the pair found a way to A) have a great time in New Orleans, and B) win the tournament.
This is not a drill. Rory McIlroy singing Don’t Stop Believing pic.twitter.com/y5PkEDoqo4
— Brody Miller (@BrodyAMiller) April 28, 2024
“The reason that Shane and I both started to play golf is because we thought it was fun at some stage in our life,” McIlroy said that Sunday. “I think sort of reinjecting a little bit of that fun back into it in a week like this week, it can always help.”
The two are committed as of this writing to participate again, and there’s some amount of pressure placed on the most recent champion to return to the event. It’s good for the tournament, the sponsors and the host city.
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It’ll again be a good hang for McIlroy and Lowry, without pressure, and would allow McIlroy to begin to normalize things before ramping up for the second major of the season, the PGA Championship at Quail Hollow in Charlotte, N.C., from May 15-18.
Quail Hollow normally hosts the Truist Championship (formerly the Wells Fargo Championship), and McIlroy has won four times at the venue. It was his first PGA Tour win back in 2010, and he won it as recently as 2024.
(Photo: Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
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