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Rory McIlroy Makes Some Schedule Changes for 2015-16

By Kathlene Bissell

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Like every top player in professional golf, Rory McIlroy will have a schedule adjustment for 2016 because the Olympic Games have kyboshed the normal one.

The U.S. Open, British Open and PGA will be played in a seven-week stretch, followed by the return of golf to the Olympic games. The Olympics will affect the top players in many countries, including McIlroy. But McIlroy started his 2016 at Frys.com for a reason that has nothing to do with the Olympics.

“The last couple of years in the FedEx Cup, I feel like I’ve always been playing catchup because I start the PGA Tour season at the end (of) February when most guys are starting now. It’s nice to get a couple of events in before the turn of the year,” he said to media at the Frys.com event in Napa, CA.

He said he will also play the HSBC in China for the same reason.

“It seems like any time I come back to the PGA Tour in February a lot of guys have played eight, ten events already,” he added. “Hopefully when I get back to Florida I won’t be feeling the pressure of trying to catch up to these guys. It’s important to get a good start.”

Between Napa and HSBC, McIlroy is not resting very much. He will take on the final events in the European Tour.

“I want to try and win the Race to Dubai over in Europe,” he explained about his immediate upcoming schedule. “I’m still leading that. I have three tournaments left to try and clinch.” There are four events remaining, however.

One of those is the HSBC event, which counts on both the PGA Tour and the European Tour due to its status as a World Golf Championship. The others are the Turkish Airlines Open, the BMW Masters and the DP World Tour Championship. The four-tournament series starts October 29 and ends November 22.

In the Race to Dubai McIlroy is being chased by Danny Willett, Louis Oosthuizen, Shane Lowry and Justin Rose. McIlroy is leading on the with just nine European events played, and Willett is 300,000+ points behind him, based on 19 tournaments.

“After Dubai, which I guess is the third week in November, I’m not going to tee it up until the third week in January,” he indicated. “That’s a good sort of six or eight weeks off there.”

During that down time, he plans to rest and get his body in shape for 2016. Then he will begin 2016 in the Middle East at the Abu Dhabi HSBC tournament, the Commercial Bank Qatar Masters and the Omega Dubai Desert Classic, if he elects to play all three.

Going to take a nice bit of down time after that and rest a little bit and try and get my body in the shape it was in I guess at the start of the year before any sort of injuries were there, and then try and hit the ground running in the Middle East at the start of the year.

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“Even though it’s the new PGA TOUR season, I feel like I’m in the middle of a nice little run to the end of the year,” he said. “I guess for a lot of guys, even the guys that played a full PGA TOUR schedule last season and then played Presidents Cup last week and they’re coming here, it’s a lot of golf. But as I said, I haven’t played as much as those guys, so I’m happy to be playing and happy to play quite a bit until the end of the year.”

Regarding the Olympics, he admitted it was going to be tough to pack in all the regular events and shoehorn the competition into the August window.

“It’s tough the way a couple of the tournaments clash before the Olympics, like the French Open and the Bridgestone,” he added. “Then having the Olympics in there and playing the PGA Championship in July is going to be sort of strange. But they had to accommodate for it somehow.”

He cited the issue of being a world player versus a PGA Tour player and the fact that being a world player requires more travel. Some, like Paul Casey, are forgoing European Tour membership for 2016 to reduce the wear and tear or changing time zones and spending so much time in the air.

“You have to fly over two weeks of the year. It’s crazy numbers,” McIlroy said. “But that’s the sort of travel that have you to do to be a world-wide player.”

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