ADA, Ohio -- If you want to learn how to drive a golf ball 350 yards down the middle of the fairway, don’t ask Rory McIlroy to teach you how to do it. Don’t get me wrong: McIlroy — who stands only 5′9" tall and weighs a mere 175 pounds — can do it better than anyone in the world. But he can’t teach the rest of us how to do it because his is a God-given talent for golf that perhaps only Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus were blessed with before him. McIlroy can teach the rest of us mere mortals something more important, though; namely, resiliency. In case you missed it, McIlroy won golf’s career Grand Slam on Sunday with his playoff triumph over Justin Rose in the Masters, a major championship that had eluded McIlroy for the 16 previous years. Indeed, McIlroy, a golf prodigy from Northern Ireland who has been compared to Woods and Nicklaus since he was a teenager, hadn’t won a major championship for 11 years. Until Sunday’s final round at the Masters, that is. And what a final round it was. McIlroy began the final round with a double bogey and lost his two-shot lead in two holes. Staked to a four-shot lead on the back nine after his competitors began making mistakes of their own, McIlroy then hit a shot that the rest of us would probably hit: He shanked a lob wedge from 82 yards into the tributary of Rae’s Creek in front of the par-5 13th green for a double bogey. But McIlroy isn’t like the rest of us, and that’s the point. After he went from a four-shot lead to trailing by one shot on Sunday, he answered with his best swings of the tournament: a 7-iron over a pond to six feet on the par-5 15th, a 9-iron to a back pin on the 16th to nine feet, and an 8-iron blind shot to two feet on the 17th. And when he failed to convert a 5-foot birdie putt on the 18th in regulation, he was headed to a playoff with Rose, a former No. 1-ranked golfer and major champion in his own right. But then McIlroy drove his golf ball 350 yards down the middle of the fairway, hit a gap wedge to three feet, won the Masters, and became only the sixth player in the history of golf to win the career Grand Slam. How did McIlroy do it? He said how. “Resiliency,” that’s how. Resiliency not just during what the marvelous golf commentator Brandel Chamblee called a “bipolar” round of golf on Sunday, but resiliency during the previous 11 years of near-miss after near-miss in major championships. As McIlroy taught us all on Sunday, when life knocks you down, you have got to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and try again. T.H. Palmer put it best in his inspirational poem: “If you find your task is hard, Try, try again; Time will bring you your reward, Try, try again. All that other folks can do, Why with patience, should not you? Only keep this rule in view: Try, try again.” Scott Douglas Gerber is the author of, among other books, “The Art of the Law: A Novel.” Have something to say about this topic? * Send a letter to the editor, which will be considered for print publication. * Email general questions about our editorial board or comments or corrections on this opinion column to Elizabeth Sullivan, director of opinion, at esullivan@cleveland.com.