It's four in the morning and all the roads that lead to Phoenix Sky Harbour are deserted. The hotel shuttle driver, a clean-cut chap in his 30s, wants to know where I'm flying to.

New York, then on to Dublin, I tell him.

"Ireland," he exclaims in such a way I suspect I'm going to be asked to "do something Irish".

Instead, right out of the blue, he says: "That's where that young guy Rory McIlroy comes from. Something else, isn't he?"

It has taken just one week for the tousle-haired Holywood teenager to catch the imagination of the American public.

Kids of all ages readily identify with McIlroy because he's even younger-looking than his 19 years would suggest and he wouldn't appear out of place on their bus to school.

For precisely the same reason, one suspects, women of a certain age feel protective towards him. Yet everyone has simply been blown away by the quality and the power of his golf game.

Americans were slow at first to accept McIlroy's rapid elevation into the world's top 20 on the back of his recent European Tour victory at the Dubai Desert Classic.

"They don't generally look east of the Atlantic or west of the Pacific Ocean very much," explains Geoff Ogilvy, the Australian who edged out McIlroy in a thrilling quarter-final on his way to victory at last weekend's Accenture Match Play Championship in Arizona.

"If it doesn't happen here (in the States), it doesn't get the credibility that it probably should. Dubai had a better field than the tournament held on the same week over here.

“Obviously they are going to sit up and take notice of Rory after this week."

There are other gifted young players, notably Japanese 17-year-old prodigy Ryo Ishikawa and New Zealand's Danny Lee (18), but McIlroy has become the first of golf's 'generation next' to crack the American market.

Until Tucson McIlroy had resolved, until now, that he would not visit Augusta before US Masters week, insisting "it's just another golf course".

Yet he has decided to heed the advice of many, including Ogilvy and reigning Masters champion Trevor Immelman, to go to Augusta National a couple of weekends before the season's first Major to dispense with the 'wow factor' of playing for the first time at golf's most famous venue.

When it comes to the Masters, Ogilvy offers McIlroy some down-to-earth advice. "The key to playing there for the first time is the mental aspect and it will do him well to get there before the tournament.

"It'd be a massive disadvantage not to do that. It gives you the opportunity to get a lot out of the way so that when you turn up on tournament week, you can just go.

"It's a cool place and certainly it's worth seeing for the first time without anybody there."