McIlroy insists rebound is near
World No. 4 seeking first win of 2017
Rory McIlroy joked last week after missing the cut in the Scottish Open that he’s starting to sound like a broken record, his game stuck in a rut and just a nudge from again playing smoothly.
“My game is close. My game is close. My game is close.”
Again on the eve of the British Open at Royal Birkdale, McIlroy was repeating the refrain. Despite missing the cut in three of his last four starts, he said he’s close. Despite only playing 10 competitive rounds since mid-May, he said he’s close. Despite being winless this year, he said he’s close.
“As I keep saying, it doesn’t feel that far away,” the four-time major winner and 2014 Open champion said Wednesday. “Because I haven’t played that much, the only thing I can really do is take some sort of confidence from what I’m seeing in practice, and sometimes that doesn’t quite translate to what happens on the course.
“But I’m in good spirits. I feel like it’s all coming together. I’m just waiting for that round or that moment or that week where it sort of clicks and I’ll be off and running. I’ve had little periods like this before in my career, and I’ve been able to bounce back from them. I’d say I was in worse positions than this. The pieces are there. It’s just about trying to fit them together.”
The pieces were there in January when McIlroy lost in a playoff in the South African Open in his first start of the year. But a stress fracture of a rib he suffered that week has led to his broken record refrain of late.
He sat out for seven weeks, then came back and played decently with three top-10s in four starts. But he was forced to take another month off when the rib became troublesome. Since returning, his game has been out of whack, with his putting and wedge play subpar.
“It’s been a very stop-start year,” said McIlroy, who has been world No. 1 on seven occasions — for a total of 95 weeks — but has dropped to No. 4. “It hasn’t been the year that I had planned, going back to January and feeling like I was in a good place in my game.
“But these things sort of crop up out of nowhere, and they challenge us. It is what it is. I’m sticking to what I know, which is working hard on my game and feeling like I’m doing the right things. And just trying to stay as patient as possible and enjoy the process of trying to improve and trying to get better and trying to prepare for tournaments and hit the shots that I’m going to need for that week. It hasn’t quite happened for me over the past couple of weeks.”
McIlroy says he’s conscious of the injury, but it’s not bad.
“There’s a little bit of irritation in there every once in a while, and I just have to know how much volume I can put it through,” said McIlroy, who has played 10 events this year. “It’s just hard because it comes from doing what you need to do, which is hitting balls in practice. So it’s sort of a Catch-22 — you don’t want to hit too many balls and aggravate it too much again, but at the same time if you want to compete and you want to try to win some of these biggest tournaments in the world, you have to put in the time and put in the practice, and that’s where it can be a little bit difficult.”
McIlroy has dealt with difficult times before, most notably after he ruptured an ankle ligament playing soccer in 2015. He has come back in fine form each time.
“The one thing about Rory is as soon as you question him, he’ll do something special and turn it all around,” 2013 U.S. Open champion Justin Rose said. “It’s happened a few times in his career where people say he’s in a bit of a slump and then he’ll win the FedExCup.
“So I never worry about him from that point of view.”
McIlroy said his time to return to dominance is coming soon. The local betting parlors have him at 20-1 to win this week, an astoundingly high number; he’s usually a co-favorite and no higher than 12-1.
“If I was a betting company and I saw my form over the past few weeks, you would say, ‘Yeah, that’s probably a fair enough price.’ But, again, all it takes is one week for those odds to go back to, I don’t know, 7-1, 8-1 at Quail Hollow (for the PGA Championship),” McIlroy said. “So as I say, good week to back me. … My game is all there. Again, it’s just about staying as positive as I possibly can, and I’m as positive as I can be going into tomorrow. And we’ll see how that goes. I’ve done some pretty good things in this game, and I don’t feel like I’m that far away from doing them again.”