AUGUSTA, Ga. — Two months before the burden was lifted, when all the pressure in the world remained on Rory McIlroy’s shoulders, he held steady in the path.

At the Genesis Invitational in San Diego, McIlroy missed a putt on Torrey Pines’ third hole and a fan yelled, “Blame your caddie!” No, sir. That doesn’t fly with Rory.

“Shut the (expletive) up,” McIlroy said to the fan.

There’s the one line McIlroy won’t let people cross. Eleven years without a major championship, and McIlroy tried everything. Really, everything. Hypnosis. Exposure therapy. Books. Self-improvement podcasts. He tried to gain weight and chase speed like Bryson DeChambeau. He once told his team he needed to blow up his entire swing after another major top-10 finish. He physically could not keep living this life of coming so close and failing to reach the mountaintop.

But that topic? That’s the one topic McIlroy has no time for. His caddie. Harry Diamond. Nonnegotiable.

As McIlroy sat at the Augusta National Press Building podium Sunday, celebrating his Masters win to complete the career Grand Slam, the one question that tripped him up in a lengthy news conference filled with emotion was the one about Diamond. The fact it came from another Irishman, Golfweek’s Eamon Lynch, made it hit harder. The second McIlroy heard Diamond’s name, he began to choke up, taking a moment to regather himself. “Eamon!” McIlroy said with jest.

“I’ve known Harry since I was 7 years old,” he said through tears. “I met him on the putting green at Holywood Golf Club. We’ve had so many good times together. He’s been like a big brother to me the whole way through my life.

“To be able to share this with him after all the close calls that we’ve had, all the crap that he’s had to take from people that don’t know anything about the game, yeah, this one is just as much his as it is mine.”

Sunday night was about Harry Diamond as much as it was about Rory McIlroy, in part because it tells us so much that people don’t understand about McIlroy. When a golfer is as open and insightful as McIlroy is — an open vein for better or worse — it can trick people into thinking we know him. We do not. We do not know McIlroy’s life. We don’t know the actual pain he feels from each nightmarish defeat over these 11 years. It’s all a well-orchestrated version of reality.

Diamond, though. He knows McIlroy. He truly knows him. Long before McIlroy was on TV as a child prodigy, before he was the most hyped amateur since Tiger Woods, before he became a four-time major champion by the time he was 25 and before he became known as golf’s tortured, brilliant loser, Harry knew Rory.

He wasn’t even his caddie until 2017, when McIlroy split with longtime looper JP Fitzgerald. Diamond was just his closest friend. The best man at his 2017 wedding. That’s why McIlroy chose him. He wanted somebody who knows him in and out and can help aid his, at times, volatile temperament in the most stressful situations. To be clear, Diamond knows golf. He’s a proper stick in his own right, winning the 2012 West of Ireland Championship and reaching the final of the 2011 North of Ireland Championship. But Diamond isn’t the one reading putts. He’s not having lengthy mic’d up debates over shot selection.

So throughout these eight years, Diamond has become target No. 1. To many, he’s been the scapegoat for why McIlroy went these 11 years without a major championship.

They said he needed a real caddie. He needed somebody who could tell him off when his bravado got the best of him. Those criticisms have been a steady undercurrent for years, but they reached an apex last summer after McIlroy’s 2024 U.S. Open collapse at Pinehurst. The thought was a better caddie would have talked McIlroy out of the club he picked when he flew the green on No. 15. Or would have talked him out of driver on No. 18 before he hit it into the native area and had to lay up.

NBC Sports analyst Smylie Kaufman went in on that 15th tee shot decision on his podcast. Tiger Woods’ old swing coach and current pundit Hank Haney said, “If Steve Williams was Rory’s caddie, I can promise you he would have never hit a perfect-flighted 7-iron that rolled over the green on 15 into a terrible lie because he would have hit an 8-iron and sent it straight up in the air and held the green.” These kinds of specific callouts have recently reached the point to where critics are specifically suggesting replacements, like Matt Fitzpatrick’s old caddie Billy Foster. This isn’t normal in golf. It’s not like an offensive coordinator in football, with angry fans lamenting the play calling. But McIlroy is different. His greatness comes with a different standard, and Diamond became the fall guy.

So, weeks after that painful disaster at Pinehurst, when McIlroy spoke for the first time about it all, he got a question about whether he needed to move off Diamond. No, sir. Didn’t fly.

“You know, it’s certainly unfair. Hank Haney has never been in that position,” McIlory said. “Smylie has been in that position once, and I love Smylie, and he was out there with us on 18.

“But just because Harry is not as vocal or loud with his words as other caddies, it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t say anything and that he doesn’t do anything. I just wish that, you know, these guys that criticize when things don’t go my way, they never say anything good when things do go my way.”

Where were they when he won Dubai, he asked. Where were they when he won signature events or FedEx Cups or Ryder Cups? They brought it up only in the losses. This is not to say who was right or wrong. This is not a story about how good of a caddie Diamond is. It’s a story about the living avatar for this past decade in frustration. He was the one man McIlroy would never break with, and Sunday, he was the one there to make those 11 years worth it.

As McIlroy went to the scoring building to take a moment before his playoff with Justin Rose — after multiple missed opportunities such as the double bogey on 13, the bogey on 14, the missed putt to win on 18 — there was potential to unravel. At the core of it, they knew there was a chance McIlroy just gave away the Masters.

Diamond, in his sheepish Irish way, told him, “Well, pal, we would have taken this on Monday morning.”

That was the reset McIlroy said he needed. This playoff was not about how close he was to winning in regulation but that he had a chance to win it right then and there. “Look,” Diamond said, “you would have given your right arm to be in a playoff at the start of the week.”

And when McIlroy hit the playoff wedge on 18 that spun back to 4 feet, when he made the putt to finally get the monkey off his back, he fell to his knees in absolute relief. But when he stood, he rushed to grab Diamond. They held each other for nearly a minute, two brothers, a relationship nearly 30 years in the making, feeling something earned together.

Paul Kimmage of the Irish Independent is the man to follow in this moment. He’s covered Rory through it all. And Shane Lowry. And Diamond, for that matter. Days before the Masters, he spoke with Lowry, the Irish golfer and one of McIlroy’s closest friends. In the back and forth, Kimmage mentioned he had spoken with Diamond, and Diamond told him: “(Rory)’s bubbling now. He’s boiling.”

How can you tell?

“I see it,” Diamond said.

“He has to cover it up because there’s cameras on him 24/7,” Lowry said.

That was always, for better or worse, part of the idea. At least in Rory’s mind. He needed somebody who really knew him to be his counterbalance out there. Rory was his own CEO on a golf course, in charge of his coaching, his strategy, his reads, and what he really needed was a friend.

“Some of the s— Harry gets off the back of it, now that really does my head in,” Lowry told Kimmage. “Dustin Johnson had his brother caddying for him for 10 years, and nobody said anything. Other players have had the same caddie for 15 years, but everything Rory does is scrutinized.”

Therein lies the rub. Nobody watching on TV has any clue what a caddie does. This is being written by a golf writer, and none of us actually have a clue who the good and bad caddies are outside of word of mouth. Pretending some loopers are great because we’ve seen them for years is all contrived. Fake. Fugazi. Only the players know what’s going on.

“To be honest, there is no caddie in the world that would be better for Rory than Harry Diamond,” Lowry continued. “Harry is always there a day before Rory. He’s always walking the course and doing his work. And I see it, but these guys sitting there on their stupid podcasts don’t see it.”

Now McIlroy has won another major. And it happened at the Masters, the white whale he’s been chasing for 15 years.

But those conversations about Diamond aren’t going to suddenly stop. God, no. Throughout this epic, roller-coaster week, those critiques reached a new peak. Harry gave him a bad club Thursday on 17. Harry should have told him to chip away from the water Thursday. Billy Foster would never have let him keep hitting a driver.

Who cares?

We’re not done living and dying with the roller coaster that is McIlroy’s career. The obsession over his peaks and valleys will not suddenly stop. Fine. Because Sunday, for that moment in time when the outside world faded and McIlroy could simply release, two lifelong friends from Holywood could wrap their arms around each other and say, “We really did it.”

And we know what McIlroy has to say about the rest of it.

(Top photo of Rory McIlroy, left, and Harry Diamond: Michael Reaves / Getty Images)