During Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship week, the DP World Tour set up the Hero Challenge on the seventh hole of Yas Links. What was the challenge? Make a 139-yard putt.
Over 65 players in the field participated in the Hero Challenge, including Tommy Fleetwood, Min Woo Lee, Robert MacIntyre and Justin Rose. But it was David Micheluzzi who poured it in.
The 139-yard make broke the world record by five yards and Micheluzzi now holds a Guinness World Record title.
The 28-year-old Australian made the putt with his second attempt. He’s playing in this week’s Australian Open and is tied for 33rd through three rounds.
Watch Micheluzzi’s incredible putt — and epic celebration — below.
“When you shoot a 62, obviously everything is going to have gone very, very well.”
The last time Tommy Fleetwood teed it up in a competitive round was a month ago at the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship, where he finished third.
However, when he got home for one of his first periods of rest in some time, he decided to start tinkering with his putting. He put a new TaylorMade putter in the bag, and on Wednesday in his pre-tournament press conference, he praised how he had practiced with it, but he was excited to put it to use in the heat of competition.
“To have that time at home to work on something that I’ve put a lot of effort into and something I’m really interested in; and like I said, TaylorMade have done an amazing job with it, and it’s felt good,” Fleetwood said.
After one round, it looks like a worthwhile equipment change.
Fleetwood shot 10-under 62, tying the course record at Yas Links to take the first-round lead at the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship, the DP World Tour’s penultimate event on the schedule. He was the best putter in the field Thursday, needing only 26 putts, the lowest of any competitor in the field, and 1.5 putts per hole, which was second in the 70-player field. Fleetwood had eight birdies and an eagle en route to his record-tying round.
“Putted amazing,” he said. “Felt like I read the greens so well. Beautiful pace control and hit a lot of good putts and started holing them. I worked even all the way through to the last hole, I just hit perfect putts.
“When you shoot a 62, obviously everything is going to have gone very, very well. Just happy to have got off to a great start.”
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Tommy Fleetwood of England putts on the 18th green during day one of the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship 2024 at Yas Links Golf Course on November 07, 2024, in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. (Photo by Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)
Fleetwood said through the second half of 2024 he felt he wasn’t getting everything out of his putting as he would’ve liked. He’s a longtime pupil of Phil Kenyon, the putting coach who helped Scottie Scheffler drastically improve on the greens this year.
However, Fleetwood ran into Ken Brown and David Howell, former Scottish and English, respectively, professional golfers, who started to discuss putting with Fleetwood, sparking him to make the change
Early on, the results are paying off.
“I’ve worked with Phil Kenyon for a long time. He’s an unbelievably putting coach. You know, I always feel like I’m a good putter. It doesn’t always show,” Fleetwood said. “I happened to bump into Ken and Howler on the course and we were talking about a couple of things. Working on how I move my head in my stroke in a couple of practice drills and what happens there.
“And it’s always nice to have a good discussion. They are two of the best putters I’ve ever met and any time you’re talking to those guys, you’re always going to pick something up.”
And pick up the first-round lead, he did. Fleetwood is in front by a shot over Thorbjorn Olesen and Johannes Veerman. Tyrrell Hatton is a part of the group T-4 at 8 under. Rory McIlroy, fresh off a revamped swing, shot 5-under 67 and is T-18.
“It felt okay,” the world No. 3 said. “Sort of gotten comfortable with doing this little rehearsal before I take the club back. It felt fine. I probably wasn’t as imaginative out there or I was sort of hitting very straight shots and I hit a couple where I didn’t really see the picture of what I was trying to do with the ball flight because I was thinking too much on what I was doing with the swing.”
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“I thought it was important to get in there and do that.”
Most followers of professional golf would agree: Rory McIlroy has one of the best swings in the game.
It’s powerful, smooth and impactful, leading to him being one of the world’s best players for more than a decade now. However, to him, he hasn’t liked the shape of his swing, “for a while, especially the backswing.”
So what did he do? Locked himself inside.
“I sort of committed after the Dunhill that I wasn’t going to watch my ball flight for three weeks,” McIlroy said. “So locked myself indoors in like a swing studio for three weeks and just hit balls into a blank screen or net and just focused on my swing and focused on the movement of my swing and focused on movement of my body patterns. Had a live feed on a TV in front of me of where the club was, and just sort of trying to get the reps in of making the motion that I want to make.
“Then over the past ten days now, sort of from last Monday, started to see the ball flight and get a bit more comfortable with what the ball was doing in the air. Still trying to focus on the move that I want to make. But I think those three weeks were important. I had not had time to sort of do that over the past 18 months. So I thought it was important to get in there and do that.”
McIlroy continued, saying if he were blasting ball after ball on the driving range, he would be enamored with the flight and not his mechanics.
The revamped backswing, which he will continue to work on ahead of the 2025 season, will be put on display the next two weeks in the final events of the DP World Tour’s season. This week, it’s the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship at Yas Links, where a top-two finish can secure McIlroy the top spot in the Rolex Series, the season-long points race that McIlroy has won five times previously.
Only two golfers (Colin Montgomerie with eight, Seve Ballesteros with six) have won more.
Rory McIlroy of Northern Ireland plays a shot on the 18th hole during day four of the BMW PGA Championship 2024 at Wentworth Club on September 22, 2024 in Virginia Water, England. (Photo by Luke Walker/Getty Images)
“I pride myself — I’m a European player. I would like to go down as the most successful European of all time,” McIlroy said. “Obviously Race to Dubai wins would count to that but also major championships and hopefully I’ve got a few more Ryder Cups ahead of me as well. So that’s something that I would like to, I think is a goal that’s quite attainable over the next ten years.”
This week will mark McIlroy’s 26th start in 2024, and after next week, he will have played a heavy schedule he looks forward to rejuvenating from over the holidays.
But in the meantime, this week is about seeing how his swing changes have helped. And if he was playing like the world No. 3 before the time locked inside, perhaps that is what it will take to finally get back in victory lane.
“It’s nice to come here with motivation of trying to achieve something and give — put all my efforts into the next two weeks,” he said.
