Opening day woes again for McIlroy at Sawgrass

DOUBLE BOGEY: Double bogey at the 10th hole for tee off sets Rory McIlroy off on the wrong foot. Pic: AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall

For all the good things Rory McIlroy has done on behalf of the PGA Tour, the least they could do is let him start the Players Championship on the first hole from now on.

For the third consecutive Players since McIlroy won the flagship event in 2019, McIlroy has opened his first round at TPC Sawgrass on the Stadium Course’s tricky par-4 10th hole. For the third consecutive year, it didn’t go well.

McIlroy made a sloppy double bogey on Thursday morning playing, matching the pair of 6s he made on the same hole in 2021 en route to missing the cut. In 2022, McIlroy got away with merely a bogey, which counts as a victory of sorts on his nemesis hole.

That 10th hole once again set a sour tone for McIlroy’s day. His driver that flared wide right into the rough became a familiar theme to his opening-round 76 that left him in front of only nine players in the preferred morning half of the draw. He missed the fairway right on 15, 16, 18, 1 and 7 as he drifted as to a 4-over par start.

“It’s very penal when you don’t hit fairways and I just didn’t hit a lot of fairways today and that’s the reason the score is what it is,” McIlroy said.

“I feel like this is as penal as I’ve seen it out of the rough for a long time. I think you’d have to go back to when the tournament was in May with the Bermuda rough to be as penal as that. Yeah, you don’t hit it on the fairway here you’re in trouble.” 

McIlroy’s major issue is with his new TaylorMade Stealth Plus2 driver that he put into play after the first round at Riviera after benching his favorite TaylorMade Stealth Plus driver he used nearly the entirety of 2022. Not wanting to take a chance that the more than year of use and wear on his old driver might have kept it from passing a scheduled COR test in Los Angeles with too much trampoline effect, he made the decision to start searching for the right replacement.

“The more a club is used, the more it's hit, the more springy the face becomes,” he said.

Now it’s basically a race against time for McIlroy to get a new one dialed in in time for the Masters next month.

“Look, I wish I could use my driver from last year, but I can't just because you use a driver for so long, and it starts to get a little too … basically it just wouldn't pass the test.

“These driver heads are so finicky, it's hard to get one exactly the same. Yeah, I mean, I'm obviously trying my best, trying to get something that's as close to what I had last year. Yeah, just struggled a little bit off the tee the last couple weeks.

“This one is as close as it's been. Yeah, there's obviously a part of it that's the user, as well. It's quite a lot of user error in there, as well.” That user error Thursday was compounded with some short-game mishaps that cost him precious strokes throughout the round. He three-putted after a brilliant recovery from the pine straw on the par-5 16th and made bogey from the middle of the fairway on his finishing par-5 ninth along with failing to get up and down from the greenside to save pars on both 1 and 3.

“I made a good birdie on 11 and was solid enough and missed a couple chances and then the three-putt on 16 was the one that sort of stopped any momentum,” McIlroy said. “I hit a really good shot out of the pine straw there and didn’t really capitalize on that.

“When I turned I thought okay if I can get myself back even par for the day it’d be all right. But yeah, I just couldn’t really get anything going. I hit it in the middle of the fairway on 9 there and to make bogey is obviously very disappointing. Need to regroup and try to shoot a good one tomorrow and be here for the weekend.” 

McIlroy will have to go low Friday afternoon to avoid missing his second Players cut in three years – a manageable prospect made trickier by a more difficult course setup than usual.

“You’ve got the four par-5s that are gettable and then 4 and 12, so six really gettable ones that if you’re on your game you should be making birdie on those,” he said. “So there’s still plenty of opportunity.”