Rory McIlroy’s major championship wait carries on. So will he

LOS ANGELES — In major championship golf, like Los Angeles traffic, it’s the waiting that wears you down.

There’s been a symbiotic relationship between Rory McIlroy and Rickie Fowler that stretches back to the Walker Cup at Royal County Down in 2007, when they were 18, all flowing locks and potential. Both have delivered on that promise, one more than the other.

Fowler’s first PGA Tour victory came in a playoff over McIlroy at the same course where McIlroy had won his maiden title two years earlier. McIlroy’s last major win, the ’14 PGA Championship, came in a twilight nail-biter over Fowler at Valhalla. His first major title – the ’11 U.S. Open – was logged less than four years after he turned professional, so he was never branded as the best golfer without a major, the burdensome millstone that has been draped around the neck of so many. Fowler, almost five months older, has been mentioned in such dispatches on the back of a handful of Tour titles, including the Players Championship.

For McIlroy, three more majors followed in quick succession – two PGA Championships and the older Open – but none since that second Wanamaker Trophy at Valhalla nine years ago. For about half of those 3,234 intervening days, he’s had a sense of how it feels to wear that major-less label. He has four of them, but McIlroy has became known as the best player waiting for another major. And that might be worse than the winless designation.

Being referred to as the best player without a major suggests that one’s best is ahead. To be known as the best player waiting for another implies that the best might well be in the rear view.

McIlroy has done about all he can to dispel that notion since Valhalla: another 14 wins on the PGA Tour with three victories in the season-long FedEx Cup, another four wins in Europe and three season’s best titles there, plus 18 top ten finishes in majors, half of them top fives. That’s several careers worth by most standards, but for all that he is continually judged by what he has not won lately.

Even casual observers noticed a change in McIlroy this week. Outwardly, not much was different. Sure, he skipped a press conference – his reasoning was that he’d said all he wants to on the PGA Tour’s proposed deal with the Saudi Public Investment Fund – but otherwise he was his usual self. But there was also an unmistakable edge of impatience, the air of one who has had just about enough of this crap in the…