RORY McILROY has vowed to block out the “noise” surrounding his latest bid to win the Masters and complete the career grand slam.

The noise has been present ever since McIlroy won the Open Championship in 2014 to get within touching distance of joining Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods in golf’s most exclusive club.

It has grown louder with every unsuccessful attempt to conquer Augusta National and the volume has been turned up another notch in 2025 thanks to McIlroy’s victories in the Pebble Beach Pro-Am and Players Championship, the first time he has won twice before the year’s first major.

“It’s just narratives. It’s noise,” said McIlroy, who revealed his choice of reading this week is a John Grisham novel with the potentially ominous title of The Reckoning.

“It’s just trying to block out that noise as much as possible. I need to treat this tournament like all the other tournaments that I play throughout the year.

“Look, I understand the narrative and the noise, and there’s a lot of anticipation and build-up coming into this tournament each and every year, but I just have to keep my head down and focus on my job.

“It’s been a nice way to start the year with the two victories at Pebble Beach and Sawgrass.

“Had a decent showing last time out when I played in Houston a couple of weeks ago, had a good weekend, and then I’ve had a couple of visits up here, and been very glad to do that, especially with the [bad] weather yesterday [Monday].

“It’s been a really good sort of lead-in to it. Spent a week at home and had Michael Bannon [his coach] over and we were doing some practice and played quite a bit of golf and tried to stay as sharp as I could.

“It’s been a good week and obviously looking forward to getting this thing going on Thursday. Hopefully I can give myself a chance to win this tournament and that would be awesome.”

While McIlroy has seldom threatened to claim a coveted green jacket at Augusta, he came close to winning a second Open title in 2022 and finished runner-up in the US Open in each of the last two years.

McIlroy briefly held a two-shot lead at Pinehurst last year with five holes to play but bogeyed three of the last four, missing very short putts on the 16th and 18th to finish a shot behind Bryson DeChambeau.

“I think over the course of my career I’ve showed quite a lot of resilience from setbacks, and I feel like I’ve done the same again, especially post-June last year and the golf that I’ve played since then, and it’s something that I’m really proud of,” the world number two said.

“You have setbacks and you have disappointments, but as long as you can learn from them and move forward and try to put those learnings into practice I feel like that is very, very important. I feel like I’ve showed that quite a lot over the course of my career.

“When you have a long career like I have had, luckily, you sort of just learn to roll with the punches, the good times, the bad times, knowing that if you do the right work and you practice the right way, that those disappointments will turn into good times again pretty soon.”