Rory McIlroy will skip Travelers Championship to focus on links run

The Travelers Championship will be the third PGA Tour Signature event McIlroy has skipped this year

A pair of weekend 73s left Rory McIlroy well out of contention at the US Open and on track for one of his worst results of 2026. Pic: Warren Little/Getty Images

Rory McIlroy is skipping this week’s Travelers Championship, a PGA Tour event that he enjoys, setting his sights instead on a mini-run of links golf next month at the Scottish Open followed by The Open at Royal Birkdale.

McIlroy got a taste of it this week at Shinnecock Hills, as close to a links as there is in the United States. It just didn’t go as he had hoped.

“It won the battle over me at this point,” McIlroy said afterward.

A pair of weekend 73s left him well out of contention and on track for one of his worst results of 2026, outside of the top 30 finishers.

The frustrating aspect for McIlroy is that he believed he was right there with a chance on Saturday, having played the front side in 2-under par and in position to make things interesting.

But from there, it unravelled.

“I’d say it was going well until the back nine yesterday,” McIlroy said. “A couple under par for the tournament and I just let it get away from there on the back nine. Similar to Friday, too. Obviously I was 3-over for the back nine on Friday also, so I’ll rue those nines but especially yesterday because I got myself right back in the tournament the way I played the front nine and then I just let it go.

“Obviously today going in, I felt I had a tiny chance, but got off to a bad start, so a week of what could have been and pretty frustrating with how everything ended yesterday. But I’ll press myself off and go again.” 

It is the sort of thing that can happen quite easily around Shinnecock.

“Just sort of silly errors,” McIlroy said. “At the same time, I feel like I shouldn’t have let it get away. I drove the ball better this week, which was positive. I just didn’t judge the first bounce very well on the greens. The feel shots in the wind, especially where it was downwind, I didn’t do that. So now going to a couple of links tournaments, Scotland and then Birkdale, just getting used to that style of golf a little bit more.” 

It came as a bit of a surprise last week when McIlroy was not on the commitment list for the Travelers, the last of the PGA Tour’s eight Signature events this year.

McIlroy ended up skipping three of them – the RBC Heritage, the Cadillac Championship and the Travelers – after being a big advocate for the big-money events when they were first proposed in 2022.

But the two-time Masters champion has also said he wants to reduce his schedule. He now has a home outside of London and was headed there after the round. He’ll have a few weeks to get ready for the Scottish Open and then a run at a second Open Championship title.

“I'll be playing some links golf this week probably coming up, but yeah, it's my favorite time of the year to go back home and play, play the Open, and I get to spend a bit of time back there,” McIlroy said.

“This was not too dissimilar to an Open Championship in terms of how the golf course started to play over the weekend, but a bit of links golf over the next couple of weeks will be nice.”