PUTTERING ABOUT
Rory puts in extra work on greens as he puts injury aside to go for the green
RoryMcIl roy stood practicing in the same spot on the putting green for so long that he had to use his divot tool to f ix the impressions left by his feet.
That was how the 28-year-old Northern Irishman spent a large part of his time preparing for The Northern Trust, the first leg of the FedEx Cup playoff, which is set to begin at Glen Oaks Club in Old Westbury on Thursday. McIlroy was almost a surprise to play, saying after the PGA Championship two weeks ago that he might shut it down for the rest of the year to let his nagging rib injury finally heal.
Instead, he thought himself healthy enough to have a chance to repeat as FedEx Cup champion — with another cool $10 million as the prize for the season-long race — and that meant fine-tuning one of the weakest parts of his game. And standing beside him for much of the work was his relatively new putting coach, Phil Kenyon.
“I enjoy working with him,” Kenyon, who started to work with McIlroy after he missed the cut at last year ’s PGA Championship, told The Post.
Kenyon, a plucky 42-year-old Englishman, already had taught the likes of Henrik Stenson, Justin Rose, Lee Westwood, and Louis Oosthuizen, and was an adviser to the most recent European Ryder Cup team. But McIlroy is his biggest client to date, and with a few training aids down on the putting green at Glen Oaks, they continued their hard work.
“He’s a nice bloke, and obviously one of the best players,” Kenyon said. “So to get an opportunity to work with somebody like that, it’s an honor, isn’t it? Just have to try to make him hole more putts.”
McIlroy said he went through nine different putters since his tie for 17th at the Travelers Championship in Connecticut in June. A lot was made about him switching equipment after his main sponsor, Nike, opted out of the golf-club business last year. But he had bounced around with many different putters, and is using a Titleist Scotty Cameron mallet-head.
Well, at least that’s what he used early in the week during his preparations.
“Different guys have had success with putters they have had for a long time,” McIlroy said. “I’ve always been a tinkerer with that part of the game. It’s always been something that if I see something, and yeah, that’s nice and I like it and might try it out.”
McIlroy also has a newly found focus on statistics, like the one that says his putting has lost him .077 strokes per round to the field during his PGA Tour events this season. It’ s a metric called “strokes gained” that was developed by Dr. Mark Broad-
ie, who teaches graduate classes at Columbia for statistical business analysis. It just so happened that after speaking with t he media on Wednesday fol l owing t he proam, McIlroy was going to meet with Broadie to further understand where he needs to improve.
“I’m a big believer this stats and using stats and objective data to improve your game and using statistics to influence your practice and what you do on the practice range,” McIl roy said. “St ro ke s gained is the best stat, by far, that has come into our game for the l ast, well, ever, really.”
That is also going to influence McIlroy’s offseason, which he plans to start after the Alfred Dunhill Championship in Scotland at the beginning of October. From there, he plans to have an unprecedented three mont h s off, allowing him to fully recover from his rib injury. He said the problem is where his rib attaches to the vertebrae in his back, and the ligament that connects them has weakened with his heavy workload of practice and constant adjusting to get it into the proper place to play golf.
But he said the doctors have told him he can’t do any more damage by continuing to play, and he said he thinks he has a chance to win t he FedEx Cup although he came into this week ranked No. 44 in the standings.
But that would mean putting well, and that was where he was turning his immediate focus.
“At the end of the day,” McIlroy said, “it’s the person, it’s not the putter.”