Rory McIlroy, Charley Hull see golf losing something. It’s also their gift

Charley Hull is one of the best golfers on the planet. She can hit shots most people can only dream of pulling off.

And yet, you won’t find the Englishwoman glued to the television watching the game she has spent her life trying to perfect. Don’t mistake that for Hull not being interested in the sport. She’s still fascinated by the game in its intended form. That form rarely exists nowadays, though.

“I think golf back 20, 30 years ago, say 19 — up to like 2000s, it was more of an art,” Hull said on Wednesday at Royal Porthcawl ahead of the 2025 AIG Women’s Open. “The players, even then men, would have to hit draws and fades and stuff it in, where I think now it’s become more of a power game and where it’s become — the technology has advanced so much everyone can just hit it straight and far, and it’s kind of taking the art away from it.

“Whenever I watch golf, I watch golf and all that lot, like who won the British Open in the 1970s and that. I find it way more interesting back then. Like I wouldn’t really watch golf now really.”

The loss of golf’s art is a troubling sign. As technology improves and the focus shifts from creativity to perfecting automaton-like efficiency, golf is becoming more cut-and-paste, more predictable. From its inception, golf has been about rewarding the creative, the player who can see shots others can’t — whose mind can conjure up things most struggle to comprehend. It was meant to be a game for the dreamers, not the robots. Something essential to the game’s existence, a focal point in its creation, is fading away from the pro game.

A few weeks ago at the Genesis Scottish Open, Rory McIlroy was gifted a persimmon wood in honor of his Masters victory. He blistered a shot and then exclaimed, “could have played in any era.” The next day, my colleague Sean Zak asked him if his game would have translated back to the 70s and 80s, when Hull watched and artistry reigned, and McIlroy took the opportunity to riff on the state of the game.

“I’d like to think of myself more as an artist than a scientist when it comes to the game,” McIlroy said. “But I think in this generation at this point with TrackMan and biomechanics and all the technological advances, I think — again, I think my perception of myself as an artist. But I think with the way the game has went over the last 20 years, we are probably are more scientists than we are artists.”

McIlroy is an artist even as the game’s technological advances nudge him to the other side. Watch him navigate a links course, play a bunker shot or his slinging 7-iron around the trees on No. 15 at Augusta National on the Sunday of his Masters triumph. Earlier that Sunday, McIlroy found himself left of the fairway on No. 7, seemingly blocked out by the trees. Caddie Harry Diamond tried to get McIlroy to punch back into the fairway, but McIlroy insisted he saw an opening in the trees — a small window only the artist can open. He did open it, hoisting a 9-iron through a sliver of a gap, clipping a branch and nearly landing it in the hole.

“I love the pursuit of trying to figure something out,” Scheffler said. “That’s what I love about this game. I feel like you’re always battling yourself, and you’re always trying to figure things out. And you’re never going to perfect it. I can be kind of a crazy person sometimes when it comes to putting my mind to something.

“In golf, there’s always something you can figure out, there’s always something you can do better.”

Like a watchmaker trying to make the gears turn or an architect wanting to leave his signature in the sky, those like Scheffler and McIlroy, and Korda, Hull and others, find freedom in the artistry. It both grounds them on the course and allows them to lose themselves in their pursuit of “that something” that few can see and even fewer can decipher.

In the age of ball-speed fanatics and dome golfing stars, real golf still lies in the heart of those who play it best and raise it to the art form it was always meant to be.