WINNING the Ryder Cup might have been more valuable than Rory McIlroy realized.

McIlroy already was emotionally and physically spent from for a seventh straight time on home soil — and from the celebration into the next morning before flying home with Shane Lowry and their wives.

Turns out the party wasn't over just yet. McIlroy sent Lowry a text the following day inviting him over to lunch. That turned into dinner, with a couple of bottles of wine in between, and visits from a few South Florida neighbors in Ryder Cup captain Luke Donald and Michael Jordan.

McIlroy called it a "drunken lunch." Somewhere along the way, whether it was the wine or the aftermath of Ryder Cup euphoria, he asked Lowry if he wanted to play in the Zurich Classic of New Orleans, the PGA Tour's only official team event.

Equally surprising, McIlroy remembered. "He sent me a text around Christmastime," Lowry said, "and it was a nice little Christmas present for me to get." As far as team events go, the Ryder Cup and New Orleans are nothing alike except for one important element. Fun.

And that's exactly what McIlroy needed. "The reason that Shane and I both started to play golf is because we thought it was fun at some stage in our life," McIlroy said after their playoff victory at the TPC Louisiana.

"Reinjecting a little bit of that fun back into it in a week like this... can always help."

Winning never hurts, though that isn't everything. McIlroy has won six times — five on the PGA Tour, including another FedEx Cup title — since the Saudi-funded LIV Golf circuit launched in June 2022.

A tournament rarely passed the last two years without McIlroy speaking on golf's most divisive topic, whether he was whipping LIV with a switch or turning around and using it to extend an olive branch.

The softened stance toward LIV for the sake of unification has with some of his PGA Tour colleagues like Tiger Woods, Patrick Cantlay and Jordan Spieth (he used to be tight with two of them). As for golf, he won at East Lake for the third time (2022), in Scotland for the first time (2023) and in Dubai for the sixth time (2024).

But with McIlroy, so much is tied to the Masters and the one major keeping him from the career Grand Slam. He was out of it by the weekend, and the scrutiny in his game returned stronger than ever.

Never mind that he now has 34 wins around the world since turning pro at age 18 in 2007, or that he has gone only four full years without winning somewhere in the world.