McCARTHY: Rory McIlroy is ready to be hurt again at the Masters

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AUGUSTA, Ga. — Move over Marcus Aurelius, It’s John Grisham time.

We’ll get back to that in a moment.

It’s that time of year again for Rory McIlroy: Another major season, another opportunity to end his major championship drought.

Another Masters Tournament, another opportunity to join the pantheon of golf’s all-time greats by completing the career grand slam.

This is a story we’ve heard before and a story he has heard far too often. Rory McIlroy and Augusta National are the star-crossed lovers in this tale and the golfer who once seemed built in a golf lab to win at this famed course confirmed on Tuesday that he is ready to be hurt again.

The 35-year-old McIlroy arrives this week in tremendous form with early season wins at AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and the Players Championship.

As he left TPC Sawgrass with the trophy, he explained in an interview with the Golf Channel that you have to be willing to get heartbroken to achieve your greatest goals and that, for a period of his career, he wasn’t.

“I think it’s a self-preservation mechanism,” McIlroy said Tuesday. “It’s just more of a thing where you’re trying to not put 100% of yourself out there because of that.

“It happens in all walks of life. At a certain point in someone’s life, someone doesn’t want to fall in love because they don’t want to get their heart broken. People, I think, instinctually as human beings we hold back sometimes because of the fear of getting hurt, whether that’s a conscious decision or subconscious decision and I think I was doing that on the golf course a little bit for a few years.”

For many years, McIlroy would barnstorm through major championship press conferences offering his full-throated opinions on everything and anything that a reporter could think to ask.

He would open the door to his mind wide and detail the philosophy for success that he was bringing with him on that particular week. He would tell you what wine he was drinking, what book he was reading and we would all leave the room wishing we had read Marcus Aurelius in school so we’d know what exactly he was talking about.

Listening to McIlroy these days, it’s hard not to wonder whether all the soul-searching and self-help was an attempt build walls around his psyche — to push out the fear of not living up to the endless expectations of his incredible talent.

Ironically, the brutal failures at recent major championships could be what reconnects him to his greatness. At least, that’s what we’re all here to find out.

“I think once you go through that, once you go through those heartbreaks, as I call them, or disappointments, you get to a place where you remember how it feels and you wake up the next day and you’re like, yeah, life goes on, it’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be,” he said.

“It’s going through those times, especially in recent memory, where the last few years I’ve had chances to win some of the biggest golf tournaments in the world and it hasn’t quite happened.

“But life moves on. You dust yourself off and you go again. I think that’s why I’ve become a little more comfortable in laying everything out there and being somewhat vulnerable at times.”

This week, he’s still reading a book, but no longer searching for answers within the pages.

“For the first time in a long time I’m reading a novel. I actually got some fiction into my life. It’s a John Grisham book,” he said. “The Reckoning. It’s got off to a pretty good start.”

We’ll have to wait to see how it ends.