THAT WAS PATHETIC!
Rory plans to overhaul his putting technique following US PGA nightmare
IT WAS the moment Rory McIlroy’s patience with his putting finally snapped. Tormented all season by his work on the greens, the Northern Irishman promised a root-and-branch overhaul following his shocking halfway exit at his favourite major, the US PGA Championship on Friday.
McIlroy will be in the south of France next weekend to attend the wedding of his manager, Sean O’Flaherty. The plan had been to have a fortnight off thereafter before a busy stretch of five tournaments in six weeks, culminating in the Ryder Cup. That all changed due to the dire state of his putting.
‘I’ll still take time away from tournament play but I’ll have to look at my practice schedule,’ he said.
‘I need to have a good, hard look at my putting and go back to the drawing board. I need to do something.’
McIlroy is hardly the first brilliant ball-striker in the game’s history to be brought low by his putting. From Ben Hogan and Sam Snead in the Fifties to Tom Watson, Ian Woosnam and Sandy Lyle in more recent times, it almost seems the fate of those blessed with rare gifts from tee to green to be bedevilled by the 14th club.
McIlroy’s equable temperament has allowed him to ride out the quiet times to this point in his storied career and wait for the five or six weeks each year when he was blessed with touch and feel on the greens. When those weeks came, he invariably won.
This year he was expecting things to improve after having laser eye treatment last December. As he argued: ‘It has to help when reading the greens if your vision is a touch sharper.’
In reality, he’s lost all focus. There was one week at Muirfield Village at the end of May when he putted well, but that has been it.
McIlroy experimented for a few tournaments with the left-hand-below-right method favoured by Jordan Spieth and Danny Willett, and even won the Irish Open using it. But victory was almost in spite of his putting rather than because of it and the method was soon jettisoned.
Matters came to a head here at Baltusrol during 36 holes of brutal contrast, between the beauty of his long game and the beastliness of his putting.
McIlroy was so looking forward to this event on a long course tailor-made to use his power and accuracy with the driver to telling effect. And so it proved, as he led the field for two rounds in strokes gained off the tee.
But no man, not even the best driver in the modern era, can cope with a total breakdown with the putter, where he was ranked 151st in a 156-man field. Bear in mind that 20 players were club pros who don’t even play tournament golf for a living, and no wonder he drew a line in the sand.
The plaintiveness of his candour was such that most golfers would have felt a tinge of sympathy. It is one of the great agonies of golf that men can stripe the ball 350 yards with uncanny accuracy but can’t get a 5ft putt to hold its line.
‘I think if you’d given anyone else in the field my tee shots this week, they would have been up near the top of the leaderboard,’ he said. ‘That’s how pathetic I was on the greens.’
The final ignominy came on the par-five 18th on Friday, where another towering drive ought to have led to a straightforward birdie to make the halfway cut. But in chasing the flag he found only trouble and ended up with a bogey six. It must have cut him to the quick when the cut then moved down to two-over, meaning he would have made it with a par.
The biggest problem of all with putting, of course, is when it gets in your head and destroys your confidence, as Phil Mickelson, his playing partner last week, duly noted.
‘Right now, Rory is just so tentative through impact,’ he said. ‘He’s got no confidence, you can just tell. You watch him with a driver and it’s the sweetest thing you can imagine but it’s a different story with the putter.
‘I’ve played with him when he’s been rolling it beautifully but he’s just having one of those periods where he’s not feeling it.’
Meanwhile, yesterday’s third round was delayed by the threat of lightning but not before Scot Russell Knox signed for a 67 to lie three under for the tournament.