DUBLIN, Ohio – The world’s No. 1-ranked player thinks he’s ready to start playing like it again.
It’s not that Rory McIlroy is consumed with his ranking. The 31-year-old from Northern Ireland had five straight top-5 finishes at the end of 2019 and start of 2020 to regain the top ranking. But that was pre-pandemic. It seems, like so much else, as if it were from another era.
McIlroy has played in three tournaments since the PGA Tour resumed last month, and the results haven’t been anything special. His best finish was a tie for 11th at the Travelers Championship in late June after shooting an opening-round 63.
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“Since I started back, obviously the rankings have been frozen, and look, it’s a different year,” McIlroy said Wednesday as he prepared for the Memorial Tournament. “This might sound a little bad but looking back on the first three events that I played, two of the courses I hadn’t played before or hadn’t played in a very long time.
“I sort of treated them as sort of dipping my toes back in the water again and seeing how things were and how things felt in terms of no crowds and how different it was.”
McIlroy considered playing the Workday Charity Open last week at Muirfield Village Golf Club, but decided instead to work with his coach, Michael Bannon. They hadn’t seen each other in person since February. McIlroy is happy with the results that have come from their tinkering with his swing.
Now he wants to put everything together at the Memorial.
“Looking back now, it was a great three weeks’ learning experience just knowing what I know now going forward,” McIlroy said. “And look, this is a huge event. I saw a stat yesterday that this field is stronger than the last eight Masters tournaments in terms of strength of field, so there’s a lot of obviously world ranking points, and there’s a lot to be focused on this week.”
Despite his ranking, McIlroy has been overshadowed heading into the Memorial. Most of the buzz centers on five-time Memorial champion Tiger Woods’ return to the tour for the first time since the pandemic hit and on 2018 Memorial champ Bryson DeChambeau, whose reworked body and game have been the talk of the sport.
And then there are the four golfers – Webb Simpson, Justin Thomas, Jon Rahm and Dustin Johnson – who have a chance this week to wrest the top ranking from McIlroy. But he is not dwelling on that.
“The ranking, I’m not even thinking about,” he said. “I’m just trying to play well.
“Obviously, if I play well, then the ranking takes care of itself, and all I’m thinking about doing this week is playing well and putting up some good numbers.”
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For that to happen, McIlroy will have to be sharper mentally than he was in his last three tournaments.
“There was spells in that three weeks that I felt like my game was there,” he said. “It was just maybe a little erratic. I’d make a dumb mistake here or there, and then thinking back on it, as I was saying, there were just lapses in concentration, so it was more a mental thing.”
This will be McIlroy’s ninth Memorial. He has four top-10 finishes, with the best a tie for fourth in 2016.
The Memorial kick-starts the meat of the PGA Tour schedule, and McIlroy understands the stakes.
“The Memorial Tournament is one of the biggest events we play all year,” he said, “and looking forward, we’ve got a World Golf Championship in Memphis, we’ve got the first major of the season – the PGA – and then the FedExCup playoffs. We’ve got some big events coming up, so it’s definitely the start of a big run.”
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