If you want to know if McIlroy is fighting his swing then look no further than his wedge play. On Sunday, four of his bogeys came from wedges. It was so familiar but appeared no less bizarre for someone of McIlroy’s ability. He continuously put himself in position off the tee, but then proceeded to make a hash of his approaches. As he works through his “two-way miss” this is the belligerent demon who will not be budged.
He is standing over his wedges fretting if he is going long or short and if the likelihood is for a soft draw or soft pull. That is what a pro means in the contradictory-sounding statement that he or she is “missing it in the right spots”. It is to do with control and exercising this control in certain parameters and that is where McIlroy is suffering. He has been through this before – as recently as 2021 when he appointed Pete Cowen to help with the exorcism – and understands that it will take time.
In layman’s terms, the two-way miss sees the golfer’s arms get trapped behind them and from there they either stay stuck [result: slice] or in an attempt to compensate with the hands, in the very last milli-seconds the golfer flips the club [result: hook]. As anything in golf, it invades the psyche as ruinously as it does the rhythm and, like a toxic weed, is infuriating to eliminate.
“If you’ve let your swing get to a certain place over the course of, say, six months, there’s no way that you’re going to work for two weeks and all of a sudden it’s going to be where you want it to be,” McIlroy said in Ohio. “I’m not saying it will take six months to get it to where I want to, but it will certainly take longer than a week or two.”
At last month’s USPGA, Cowen told Telegraph Sport that it could take McIlroy “a couple of months” to eradicate from his system. At Oak Hill, McIlroy finished tied-seventh on that occasion as well and although, of course, that was depicted as another failure, the fact that he said “I can’t remember a time when I felt so uncomfortable over the ball for four days” means that, in fact, it was anything but.
It is not the popular view, but McIlroy again overachieved at The Memorial considering his faltering motion and that is why eyeballs should not roll at his optimistic post-event assessment. “It’s a step in the right direction,” McIlroy said. “Obviously not the result I wanted, but I feel a lot more positive about things today than I was two weeks ago at Oak Hill. It’s nice. I can get straight back on the horse again in Canada and try to take the lessons from this week.”
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