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The 10th hole at Augusta National bends severely to the left but not that far left. A 21-year-old Rory McIlroy, leading the final round of the 2011 Masters, immediately loosened his hand from the grip of his driver as he watched his tee shot sail into the towering Georgia pines and ricochet backward. “Where did that come from?” Jim Nantz asked on the CBS broadcast as McIlroy set out on a hunt for his ball, eventually finding it in the backyard of a guest cabin.

McIlroy triple-bogeyed the hole, shooting an 80 in the final round to blow a four-shot lead. Since that Sunday 14 years ago, the Masters hasn’t just been the one that got away from McIlroy. It’s the one that could complete a legacy, end an 11-year major drought and smother a narrative that he just can’t seem to escape.

He’s candid about it now, perhaps more so than ever. Stepping back on the property each year, McIlroy says he feels far removed from the round that had him crying on the phone with his parents the following day. That doesn’t mean it’s gone. McIlroy has been living in the PGA Tour winners circle, but if he were to deny 2011 is still with him, McIlroy’s reaction to a heckler at this year’s Players Championship told us otherwise.

“Sometimes,” McIlroy says, asked if those memories still creep in when he revisits the site of the wound. “I think for me, with Augusta, especially what happened in 2011, it’s so far away. So many things have happened in my career and my life that I can sort of laugh about it now. But it’s still there.”

When the human brain recognizes it’s back in a place that echoes a past painful experience, even if that situation is only remotely similar to what actually occurred, it is physically built to provide us with alarm bells.

The mind subconsciously shifts from pursuit to prevention.

“It’s human nature,” McIlroy says. “We were designed to survive. So, oh — don’t do that! That puts you in danger. Do this instead.”

At the Masters more than any of the other majors, the brain shows us exactly how it was designed to operate. Raymond Prior, a performance psychologist who has worked with multiple Masters champions, likens it to a prehistoric time: “If it were 250,000 years ago, and your brain didn’t remember that this is where you saw saber-toothed tigers last time, you’d be dead really soon.

“The environment at the Masters, and the social and competitive meaning we give to it, make it what we might say is a trigger-rich environment. But what that triggers and why it triggers really comes from us, individually.”

Scar tissue is a medical term, but in golf it’s become something of a buzzword. It references a psychological phenomenon among elite players who have undergone a public disappointment, and the memories accompanying it, particularly when returning to the place that provided the pain. Revisiting these locations provokes a neurological process: The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls rational, conscious thought, takes a backseat to what psychologists call the “old” brain, the part that’s in control of “safety mode.” In golf, that can manifest in tense swings, overly defensive strategy and, in extreme cases, the yips.

“Scar tissue is real,” McIlroy says, standing in the shadow of the TPC Sawgrass clubhouse. “People accumulate scar tissue at Augusta because you go back there every year, you remember the shots, you remember the place you were. If we didn’t go back there every year, what happened to me in 2011, what happened to Jordan (Spieth) in 2016, those things wouldn’t become as big of a deal.”

Experts insist scar tissue is a myth in this application because it insinuates that we’re stuck with only one option after we fail: Crumbling every time we face it again.

Allowing that fear to swallow us up — the fear of repeating old mistakes, in golf’s case — is a great tactic for avoiding death-by-predator. It’s much less helpful when you’re trying to strike a golf ball in the middle of the clubface and win a major championship.

The subject is taboo because the best athletes in the world never want to be perceived as weak. Plus, failing on an international stage doesn’t necessarily yield positive feedback from the sports community.

But, McIlroy says, this is all in our nature. Why not lay it all out there? McIlroy admitted after the Players Championship that he woke up at 3 a.m. feeling anxious and couldn’t fall back asleep. Then, on the walk from the 16th to 17th holes in the Monday playoff, a mortifying image crossed his mind: Hitting his tee shot into the water. These days, he’s working on how to respond to those thoughts with performance psychologist Bob Rotella. McIlroy has tried it all when it comes to mental training.

“I believe in all of it,” McIlroy says. “Whatever helps.”

In early March 2024, McIlroy experimented with hypnosis. Alongside Dr. Richard Bandler, an expert in the field of psychotherapy and behavioral change, McIlroy was put into a hypnotic state, which is commonly achieved through rapid eye movement and specialized breathing techniques. His first introduction to the treatment came through the self-guided hypnosis app Reveri, built by Dr. David Spiegel to break anything from a nicotine addiction to chronic pain. McIlroy was curious, and not just because of his past Masters experiences. He wanted to try the real thing.

McIlroy was put into a conscious but “tranced state,” as he describes it. No external substances were put to use: “It wasn’t like Aaron Rodgers doing ayahuasca,” McIlroy quips.

“I have been put in hypnotic states before, to see if it helps,” McIlroy said. “When you come out of a hypnotic state, you definitely feel a sense of clarity and a sense of — I don’t know why I was making such a big deal out of all of that. So it’s a type of mindfulness in some ways. All these things can help, some things help some people. The hypnosis thing, I felt really good after it but I don’t think it really helped a ton.”

McIlroy was forced to play his second shot on No. 10 from the backyard of a neighboring home. (Andrew Redington / Getty Images)

Clinical hypnosis can help individuals reach a more vulnerable state — one in which you can start to process events and explain them to yourself differently. It doesn’t translate for everyone.

“You’re always searching for an edge,” McIlroy continues. “I think I’ve figured out the way that I need to think and the way I need to process things to do well on the golf course. But I think you’re always saying, could it be better?”

Jordan Spieth was eight holes away from becoming the youngest back-to-back champion in Masters history in 2016. Then his ball plunged into the water on No. 12, Amen Corner’s famed par-3. Moments later, it happened all over again, this time with a wedge in his hands.

Spieth immediately turned his back to the shot. He physically could not look at the mess he’d just made. “I kind of lost a little bit of my own freedom, thoughts on who I am as a person and as a golfer,” he said two years later, the moment still haunting him.

Now, Spieth speaks of reframing his past, viewing his public blunders as information, rather than trigger points. He’s worked with performance coaches on and off through the years, but he’s leaned heavily on a brain-training device called Neuropeak Pro. The wearable belt measures your body’s stress response through breathing metrics. It’s intended to help athletes physiologically prepare for pressure, but experts say the technology has limitations. Spieth uses it before every round.

“I think in general, you play (Augusta) enough, you make mistakes in certain places, the scar tissue is a way to learn and offset it,” Spieth says, as he walks down the ninth fairway during a practice round at TPC Sawgrass. “You know, don’t attack this pin, hit it away: Back left on Sunday at No. 12 and Saturday’s pin on No. 15. Just certain ones where it’s like, I’ve made a mistake here, so it’s kind of almost a good thing. You can shape it to play the right way and in the right places, and attack where you know you’ve had success.”

“I’ve offset it by now, where I’ve made a birdie to the same pin,” Spieth says. “I’m just like, okay, I’ve washed it. But you still know — you still think about how there’s danger here. You focus real hard to try to go ahead and make up for it by playing it the right way.”

Spieth walks off the 18th green after his 2016 Masters loss. (Harry How / Getty Images)

A 1995 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology concluded that suppressing undesirable thoughts in our inner experience can harm us. Attempting to redirect the thought of hitting the ball in the water to the thought of hitting it on the green can compound the initial problem, and our skills to execute can deteriorate.

“We don’t talk our way out of anxiety,” Prior says. “Trying to talk your way out of anxiety is like trying to sniff your way out of a drug addiction. What we have to do with anxiety is feel it, observe that it is not valuable to us, and that gives us the opportunity to decide what to do differently.”

Performance coach Julie Elion believes that to process the past, you have to go back to it. No band-aids, no redirection. It’s always going to resurface.

During the Players, Elion physically took two of her players back to specific holes they associated with tournament-ending shots. She had them sit with those emotions, live through them again and demystify the situation — golf’s version of exposure therapy.

“You have to face your feelings. Once you own the fear, you can start to change the narrative,” Elion says.

It’s easier said than done.

McIlroy prefaces his final thought with a warning: Some people might view this as totally backwards. In preparation for the Masters, McIlroy has been employing a tactic that he’s used throughout the years to work through the first-tee jitters — a persistent sore spot.

He visualizes his worst-case scenario.

“I’ll think about if I’m on a tee box, where’s the worst place I could hit it off the first tee?” McIlroy says. “And then I put myself there, and I’m like, well what would you do? You get up there, and figure out if you have a shot or a swing. There’s no scenario so bad that I can’t figure it out. Some people would call that negative in some ways, but to me, it can free me up.”

It turns out the strategy isn’t counterintuitive. It’s actually backed by decades of research. When faced with the possibility of our past playing out in our future, for example, the brain forms a task list and “don’t do that again!” immediately shoots to the top. It only manages to make its way up into that position because so much importance is placed on it. Our brains, therefore, perceive prevention as a necessity.

“We all have negative experiences in our past, the question is: How much value do we put on them?” says clinical sports psychologist Bhrett McCabe.

It might be non-negotiable to stop before trying to cross a freeway on foot. But hitting driver down a fairway that’s been repeatedly missed? The stakes aren’t quite as high. The brain is providing information that simply isn’t relevant for the task at hand. We just have to recognize that.

“If it’s in the left trees, what are you going to do? I’ll try to figure out if there’s a gap, and then I’ll chip it out. I think that helps minimize it, and not make it absolutely everything to you,” McIlroy says.

What McIlroy is describing is acceptance, and acceptance can help us achieve freedom. That’s how the best athletes in the world perform at elite levels. For McIlroy, Spieth — even Greg Norman, who never overcame his 1996 Masters collapse — the key would require truthfully accepting that the nightmare could happen all over again. Because if we place so much emphasis on not allowing ourselves to ever go back there, it consumes us.

“If we’re willing to accept the risk, essentially all the avoidance-based stuff starts to come off the brain’s to-do list, and we can start to gear more toward pursuit,” Prior says.

“I’m essentially asking a question, if I did this and it actually did go terribly, how would I do it so that I’m at least satisfied by how I did it, not necessarily what it produced? That’s self-governed freedom. It’s the self-given permission to perform freely without a guarantee.”

Heading into this year’s Masters, McIlroy will arrive at Augusta National in perhaps the best form he’s ever achieved to this point in a PGA Tour season: He’s had two massive wins in three months, and says he feels like a complete golfer. He is, in the eyes of many, the favorite to win.

The questions will persist, though. Can McIlroy overcome the heartbreak? Will his scar tissue bubble to the surface at Augusta National?

The answer is that it will not. McIlroy isn’t injured. He doesn’t have “scar tissue.” But he is human, and if psychology tells us anything, the human mind can deceive itself. We just have to watch out for its tricks.

(Illustration: Will Tullos / The Athletic; Photos: Mike Mulholland, Matthew Lewis / Getty Images)