Rory McIlroy won the Masters. Can he win a calendar-year Grand Slam?

We shouldn’t be talking about this. It’s probably not going to happen.

But …

After Rory McIlroy shed years of frustration by finally completing golf’s career Grand Slam at last month’s Masters, people couldn’t help but start looking ahead.

To the PGA Championship, which this year is being played at Quail Hollow, a course that CBS’s Dottie Pepper has dubbed “Rory McIlroy Country Club” because of his impressive success there. To the U.S. Open at Pennsylvania’s Oakmont, a course with which McIlroy is at least familiar (though he missed the cut at the 2016 U.S. Open there). And to the British Open at Royal Portrush, a little more than an hour away from McIlroy’s Northern Ireland hometown.

McIlroy has three wins this year, all of them in elite-field events, and hasn’t finished worse than a tie for 17th since early October. No golfer is playing better. Knowing all that, the idea of McIlroy winning the calendar-year Grand Slam suddenly doesn’t sound so outlandish, no?

“Now he gets to play the rest of his career like he’s up playing with buddies,” Jim Nantz, who was on the call for McIlroy’s Masters win and has seen just about everything in his decades of calling golf for CBS Sports, said last week. “And I think he’s going to be very dangerous moving forward. Again, whether he wins or loses, it doesn’t matter. He has sealed his spot in golf history.

“But I think he has a tremendous chance to add to it in big and wonderful ways.”

Still, it’s a big, exceedingly difficult task. In 1930, before the Masters came into existence, Bobby Jones won the British Open, U.S. Open, British Amateur and U.S. Amateur, back when those four events constituted the Grand Slam. Ben Hogan won three of the four major championships in 1953 – the Masters, U.S. Open and British Open – but had no chance to complete the Grand Slam because the mandatory qualifier for the Open Championship overlapped with the final two rounds of the PGA Championship, and Hogan chose the former.

But no golfer – not Arnold Palmer, not Jack Nicklaus, not Tiger Woods – has won the Masters, PGA Championship, U.S. Open and British Open in the same calendar year. Woods’ “Tiger Slam,” when he won the final three majors of the 2000 season plus the 2001 Masters to become the only golfer to hold all four major professional titles at the same time, is the closest we’ve come.

McIlroy’s quest for improbable immortality begins Thursday when the PGA Championship tees off at Quail Hollow in Charlotte, North Carolina, and even asking him to pull off the Masters-PGA double might be asking a lot. Only five golfers have won the first two golf majors of the year since the first Masters in 1934, the last being Jordan Spieth in 2015 (Hogan did it twice).

But still, McIlroy has won four times at Quail Hollow over his career, and a win this week wouldn’t be too far-fetched. Even he seems to think so.

“Hopefully, in two weeks’ time you’re talking about me being a six-time major champion instead of a five-time major champion,” McIlroy said with a laugh earlier this month.

Here’s a look at how the year’s first major champion has fared in the second Grand Slam event – the PGA Championship since 2019, the U.S. Open before that – since Woods’ double in 2002. Usually the first major is the Masters, but because of the coronavirus pandemic, the PGA Championship was the first major in 2020, followed by the U.S. Open.

Only one of the past six first-major winners finished in the top 20 of the major tournament that followed. Three of them missed the cut.

FanDuel has set the odds of McIlroy winning the Grand Slam at +7500, an implied probability of 1.3%. Still, it doesn’t seem totally absurd.

“Is that possible? Absolutely, it’s possible,” Nantz said. “I was trying to think of what would be anything that could happen the rest of his career that would ever approach what he had to have felt on Sunday at Augusta. And there’s only one thing that ever could happen, and that would be Sunday at Royal Portrush going for the calendar slam. That’s it. And I still don’t think it’s the same pressure (as closing things out at the Masters), believe it or not. I really don’t.

“I think that his résumé and his legacy have been cemented. Now he can go out and play with total freedom. It’s exciting. I mean, it really lines up well. I can’t speak to what Oakmont really looks like for him, but can you imagine just going for the third one after knocking off the first two? … Completely conceivable. I don’t put anything past him.”