Tom English: Talk of McIlroy outdoing Tiger is grossly unfair

Now that we've had a couple of days to blow into a paper bag to stop the hyperventilating over Rory McIlroy's remarkable victory in the US Open there is something else we can do for the remarkable young man from Northern Ireland.

We can stop with all these lofty assumptions of how he's going to own the game in the coming years, how he is going to catch Tiger's majors haul and then accelerate past it, how he is going to get into Jack's slipstream and then go right on by him, too.

Given the (understandable) euphoria that greeted his triumph at Congressional on Sunday night you'd be forgiven for thinking that McIlroy won not just one major championship in Bethesda, but 15 of them, the number he needs in order to pass Woods. The other 14 were gifted to him by an expectant golf world, the greatest gimme the game has ever known.

It is easy to see why this is happening. Golf has had a glimpse at the future and it likes what it sees. Here is a guy that has done something that only Tiger has done in modern times, only he's better than Tiger in ways because he's clean-cut, because he's open and friendly, because he's loyal and good. He's got all the game in the world and he's a brilliant kid to boot. He's golf present and golf's future.

With every passing hole at Congressional he seemed to make the Woods era seem ever more distant and ever more grubby. We desperately want him to be the new Tiger because we've had enough of Woods's sleaze and his arrogance and his rudeness and his control-freakery. Rory is what we want our heroes to be. He's got this God-given talent, this celestial ability, but he lives down here with the rest of us. He connects with people. He goes to Haiti on a charity mission. He comes back and talks about the impact it had on him. The only thing that would get Tiger to Haiti is an appearance fee. Maybe that's a low blow but to hell with it. Gone are the days when Woods deserved the benefit of the doubt.

Two snapshots from Augusta: Tiger has just finished his final round and has played better than we have seen him play in quite some time. If he doesn't have reason to be cheerful, he certainly has cause, at the minimum, to be civil. Not such a big ask, but he can't pull it off. He's truculent in his post-round interview. He's deliberately obtuse. And then when it's over, like a scalded cat, he's gone.

Rory, now. Mentally, he's lost it on that same Sunday. He's having the worst moment of his career in front of tens of millions of people. He's experiencing one of the great mortifications in the history of golf. When his horrors end on 18 he walks towards the scorer's hut and gently hands his golf ball to a youngster sitting on the grass behind the green. That one act tells you much about the boy. The word is class.

That's the kiddie for us, right? In our need for something wholesome and something fresh we anoint McIlroy as the new Tiger and we tell him, 'Go win those 15 majors to prove us right, Rory. Go and beat Jack's mark like we know you will'.We're doing him no favours by talking this way. No doubt, Padraig Harrington meant well when he said that McIlroy would break Nicklaus' record of 18 majors. No doubt, Graeme McDowell meant it when he said he'd never seen anything to compare with McIlroy's performance at Congressional. Woods won an Open by eight shots, won a Masters by 12, won a US Open by 15. There's three right there for starters.

Already we have him on the clock against Woods. Tiger won this at that age, he won two of those by the time he was this age, he had three by the time he was that age and four by the time he was another age. Stattos be damned. It was Tiger who put Jack's record on his bedroom wall as a boy, not Rory. It was Tiger who always spoke of his desire to break the magical 18, not Rory.

No doubt, the entire locker-room was gulping hard on what the Irishman did last week - not to mention being chilled at the thought of what he might do in the future - but the Tiger comparisons are grossly unfair on him.

If he was to win six majors in his lifetime, are we seriously saying that would be a disappointment? If he was to win eight, would that be him underachieving? It seems like in our rush to acclaim a new and improved version of Tiger, an ambassador as well as a winner, we're setting the bar extraordinarily and unrealistically high.