Rory Land

The Up-and-Down World of Golf's Global Icon

Timothy M. Gay

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Hardback

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English

Regalo Press
18 June 2025

Biography: sport; European history

RORY LAND is the unabashed story of Rory McIlroy, golf’s most compelling icon, the caring but conflicted soul from a troubled Irish homeland with a swing that borders on the immaculate.

Timothy M. Gay writes that four-time major champion Rory McIlroy is “golf’s ageless Opie Taylor,” a freckled superstar whose boyish charm transcends national boundaries and enlivens the game. His seemingly effortless swing is so powerful that Tiger Woods is teaching his own son to mimic Rory’s action.

But a charismatic persona and a pretty swing don’t necessarily translate into winning major championships. Over the past decade, Rory has had his heart ripped out as he’s failed to win another major and fallen short of achieving the career Grand Slam.

He’s also become a lightning rod, getting into a profanity-laced smackdown at the ’23 Ryder Cup and, after his betrayal by PGA Tour brass, causing head-scratching confusion by going from an impassioned opponent of a deal with the Saudi-backed LIV Golf to an outspoken proponent. His backtrack on LIV fits a disquieting pattern, Gay reveals, of Rory’s propensity to flip-flop on key principles and people.

McIlroy is from Northern Ireland, a geopolitical anomaly where religion and patriotism have been used as bloody cudgels for much of the past century. Both sides of his family were battered by the North’s sectarian Troubles—ugly realities that McIlroy has been loath to acknowledge.

Rory is, Gay believes, a man essentially without a country, which might explain why he’s become so obsessed with the Ryder Cup. Gay argues that McIlroy has, in effect, invented his own fiefdom, which the author has dubbed “RORY LAND.”

RORY LAND tells the up-and-down saga of a compassionate and kind-hearted superstar living in a world where “money has no conscience.”

By: Timothy M. Gay
Imprint: Regalo Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 36mm
Weight: 714g
ISBN: 9798888451298
Pages: 448
Publication Date: 18 June 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Timothy M. Gay is the Pulitzer-nominated author of four award-winning books: Tris Speaker: The Rough-and-Tumble Life of a Baseball Legend; Satch, Dizzy, and Rapid Robert: The Wild Saga of Interracial Baseball Before Jackie Robinson; Assignment to Hell: The War Against Nazi Germany with Correspondents Walter Cronkite, Andy Rooney, A.J. Liebling, Hal Boyle, and Homer Bigart; and Savage Will: The Daring Rescue of Americans Trapped Behind Nazi Lines. His articles and essays have appeared in the Washington Post, USA Today, the Boston Globe, the Daily Beast, and many other publications. He has been featured on PBS’ History Detectives, NPR, and various documentaries that have aired in both the US and Europe. The proud parents of three and the grandparents of two, Tim and his wife, Elizabeth, live in Vienna, Virginia. He is a graduate of Georgetown University.

Reviews for Rory Land: The Up-and-Down World of Golf's Global Icon

“RORY LAND is a thorough and convincing look at McIlroy on and off the course. It goes deep, which is appropriate because there’s so much to McIlroy. With his investigative eye and gift for history, Tim is the ideal writer for the task.” -- Lorne Rubenstein, golf historian, author of A Season in Dornoch: Golf and Life in the Scottish Highlands “I love watching golf on a lazy Sunday afternoon, but I never thought I’d get as absorbed in the story of an individual golfer as I did with Timothy M. Gay’s marvelous account of Rory McIlroy. Now I know why I always root for Rory. Tim’s dogged research and nimble writing made me appreciate how Rory’s story is wrapped into Northern Ireland’s, in all its beauty and heartache.” -- David Maraniss, bestselling author of Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe “RORY LAND is a lovingly wrought, vivid, thorough, unflinching and yet even-handed profile of a character so gifted and mortal, second-draft Shakespeare might have written in the margin, ‘Throttle back a bit?’” -- Bill Scheft, comedic novelist and nephew of Herbert Warren Wind