Rory McIlroy wrote Tiger Woods a letter when he was 9 years old telling him to watch his back
In a newly published New York Times Magazine profile by Charles Siebert, there's a great anecdote about how high McIlroy set his sights as a kid.
McIlroy's uncle told Siebert that when McIlroy was 9 years old he wrote Tiger a letter - though it is unclear if it ever made it to him - saying he better watch his back.
No one can recall the note's precise wording, but its general thrust, as Brian McIlroy, Rory's uncle and godfather, paraphrased in an email, put Woods on notice: 'I'm coming to get you. This is the beginning. Watch this space.'
When I met McIlroy, now the world's No. 1 golfer, in New York in December, I asked him about the letter. 'A lot of those memories have kind of blurred together,' he said somewhat sheepishly. 'But, yeah, it went something like that.'
That's some pretty great trash talk for a kid who looked like this at the time:
Seventeen years later, McIlroy is the favorite heading into the 2015 Masters, while Tiger has been away from the sport for a month to work on his broken golf game.
McIlroy has not reached the level of dominance Tiger had at his peak, but he has taken over as the top player in the world on the course. He is also making strides to replace Tiger has the face of the sport off the course. He has a deal with Nike golf - which Tiger single-handedly put on the map 20 years ago - rumored to be worth $200 million. Most recently he took over as the face of EA Sports' golf video game franchise, which Tiger had been for years.