Rory McIlroy wins 27th PGA Tour victory at 'one of the cathedrals of golf' at Pebble Beach

Rory McIlroy wins 27th PGA Tour victory at ‘one of the cathedrals of golf’ at Pebble Beach

Posted by author February 2, 2025 Golf

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One year after winning the pro-am portion of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, Rory McIlroy etched his name into the portion of the wall of champions reserved for individual winners at Pebble Beach Golf Links in Pebble Beach, California.

McIlroy shot a final-round 6-under 66 on Sunday and rolled to a two-stroke victory over Shane Lowry at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, his 2025 season debut on the PGA Tour.

“To win at one of the cathedrals of golf is really, really cool,” McIlroy said.

The sun reemerged on another windy day at the famed seaside layout, but it didn’t seem to bother McIlroy, who was dialed in and won for the eighth straight year on the PGA Tour and became the first player since Phil Mickelson 20 years ago to collect his 27^th career title.

“The way he was playing today,” Lowry said of his pal whom he played alongside in the final group, “I certainly wasn’t good enough to beat him.”

McIlroy birdied the second to tie 54-hole leader Sepp Straka. It was a bunched leaderboard with six different players trading a share of the lead on the front nine. McIlroy moved ahead with a left-to-right bending birdie putt at the famed par-3 seventh but gave the stroke back with a bogey at the difficult eighth, his only hiccup on the weekend. It seemed as if it might be McIlroy’s day when his 7-iron kicked out of the rough and on to the green at the equally treacherous ninth.

“He just got the break of the day,” CBS’s lead analyst Trevor Immelman said.

McIlroy took advantage, rifling a 6-iron from a bunker to 18-foot for birdie at No. 10 and never relinquished the lead. He tacked on a 9-foot birdie at 12, another left-to-right putt that dripped into the center of the cup to stretch his lead to two. He clenched his fist when his 26-foot eagle putt at 14 fell to extend his lead to four strokes. Of playing the first five holes of the back nine in 4 under to pull away, McIlroy said, “That run was absolutely what I needed.”

“I think he’s the most impressive player I’ve ever played with,” said Straka, who held the 54-hole lead and finished T-6 after posting even-par 72. “He just strikes it unbelievably well, hits it far but also so straight for how far he hits it. That 14th hole kind of sums it up, just a bomb drive down there. We both hit 7 there, his was 7-iron, mine was a 7-wood.”

McIlroy, 35, is coming off a season in which he won twice on both the PGA Tour and DP World Tour but is best remembered for the ones that got away, especially at the U.S. Open. As his major drought has drifted to more than 10 years since he won the 2014 PGA Championship, McIlroy is making a point of being sharpest from April through July. Lucas Glover, who shot 67 to finish in a tie for third with Justin Rose (68), said he and McIlroy practice at the Bear’s Club at home in Florida and he’s witnessed how hard McIlroy works on his game. He pointed out that McIlroy appears to be getting better with age.

“Which I don’t think people do much. But he’s hitting it maybe farther than he ever has and hitting it better than he ever has, looks to me anyway. First week out on our Tour and looks like he’s dominating. Good for him,” Glover said. “He deserves everything he gets.”

McIlroy opened with a bogey-free 66 at Spyglass Hills Golf Course, which included a hole-in-one. He grinded out a solid 2-under 70 on Friday despite four bogeys on the back nine when the wind was whipping and the temperature plummeted. On a cold, rainy Saturday, McIlroy shot a bogey-free 65 and stood a stroke off the lead.

“One of the things I really want to do this year is try to limit my mistakes and play bogey free,” he said on Saturday. “Just really try to limit the mistakes and play smart golf and be a little more like Scottie Scheffler basically.”

On Sunday, he said of the world No. 1, “just trying to take a little bit of a leaf out of his book.”

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and McIlroy delivered a virtuoso performance on Sunday, taking home $3.6 million at the signature event and 700 FedEx Cup points. When he was reminded on Tuesday of his victory a year ago with amateur partner Jeff Rhodes in the pro-am portion of the long-running Tour staple on the Monterey Peninsula, he said, “I got my name on the wall, just not the portion that I wanted.”

He took care of that on Sunday with his game once again in full flight, finishing with a 72-hole total of 21-under 267.

“It’s nice to get it up there on my own,” McIlroy said of the wall of champions. “I said to Harry walking up the last, ‘Start as you mean to go on.’ I’m just as determined this year as I have been any of the years I’ve been on the PGA Tour.”

It also didn’t go unnoticed by the Northern Irishman that he checked off a box at one of the iconic venues in golf.

“There’s a few what I would call cathedrals of golf, here – Augusta, St. Andrews obviously — maybe a few more you could add in there. I had a big fat zero on all of those going in here,” he said. “To knock one off at Pebble is very cool. Yeah, I’m a big historian of the game and I remember all the championships that have been played here, and to add my name to that list is pretty cool.”