PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – Following another Sunday fade in which he drove two balls into the water at Bay Hill’s par-5 sixth and shot 76, Rory McIlroy admitted to feeling dejected before he made the two-hour-plus drive to Northeast Florida and one of the more unusual title defenses in golf.
“I don’t know, like, maybe looking to go in a different direction. I don’t know. I need something, I need a spark, I need something and I just don’t seem to have it,” McIlroy said before he departed the Arnold Palmer Invitational.
On Tuesday, during his pre-tournament interview at the Players Championship, McIlroy elaborated on how he felt after another disappointing result for him.
“I think it was just me walking off the course not having my best day and I guess sort of venting a little bit to whoever was there at the time. So that was really it,” he said.
McIlroy’s inscrutable comments post-round lead to a flurry of Monday Morning Quarterbacking with many guessing that he might make the knee-jerk reaction of sacking his caddie or coach, but McIlroy put any of those concerns to rest.
The Players: TPC Sawgrass yardage book
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“I certainly didn’t mean like a change of personnel, per se,” he said. “I think more a change in philosophy or maybe what I’m trying to work on, maybe going in a slightly different direction.”
It’s hard to imagine how much the world has changed since McIlroy last stepped foot on property at TPC Sawgrass. He was World No. 1 and playing some of the best golf in his career. He would have been the favorite of an April Masters, and then after salvaging an opening-round 72 with birdies on his final three holes, the Players was canceled and golf took a three-month break.
McIlroy hasn’t been the same player since golf returned. He’s record four top-10 finishes in his nine starts this season, but hasn’t won in 16 months. He’s dropped to No. 11 in the world, the first time he’s outside the top 10 since the 2018 Arnold Palmer Invitational. He’s still the defending champion at the Players, a tournament that has never had a champion successfully defend, but his confidence in his game has taken a hit as he battles with inconsistency.
“It felt so good on Thursday and then felt off a little bit on the weekend, so it’s like what happened, what changed, what is the difference,” said McIlroy of his performance at Arnie’s place. “It’s funny, I’d almost feel better if my game was worse, but it’s the inconsistency of I shot 66 on Thursday and thought, I’ve got it, I feel really good, and then I didn’t quite have it. The ups and downs are just a little too much.”
That’s in stark contrast to McIlroy’s victory here in 2019, which showed off his vast array of talents. He ranked second in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee, tied for third in greens in regulation, 11th in proximity to the hole and first in Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green and led the field in par-3 scoring. McIlroy has struggled with an unusual swing pattern for him, which he blames for the difference between victory and another T-10 finish like he had at Bay Hill.
“Usually what happens is the club gets out in front of me on the way back and then drops behind me on the way down, where at the minute it’s the opposite, it sort of gets behind me early and then I sort of throw it back out in front of me on the way down,” he said. “This feeling that I have at the minute, I’m not used to managing it, so that’s where the two-way miss comes in, and that’s where I just have to figure out what to do to get it back to a familiar pattern.
“The good stuff is there. It always will be. I’ll always be able to figure it out and find a way. But it’s when it goes slightly off, how do you manage that and how do you – I feel like over the last few years, I’ve been really good at when my game hasn’t been fully there still be able to shoot 69, 70, still being able to get it under par, where I feel like the last few weeks when it hasn’t felt quite right, I’m sort of treading water and I’m just trying to shoot even par, and that was sort of what it felt like last week.”
McIlroy’s current winless drought of 16 months dating to the 2019 WGC-HSBC Championship and failure to win a major since 2014 begged the question, is his best golf behind him?
“No, I don’t think you can ever think that. I’ve talked about this before; you have to be an eternal optimist in this game, and I truly believe that my best days are ahead of me, and you have to believe that. There’s no point in me being out here if I didn’t think that. That’s just not part of my psyche or anyone’s psyche out here,” he said. “I think that’s the difference between people that make it to the elite level and the people that don’t, because they don’t think that way. I certainly believe that my best days are ahead of me, and I’m working hard to make sure that they are.”
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