Rory McIlroy: Game Troubles Are in The Plane
After the conclusion of the Arnold Palmer Invitational, Rory McIlroy, who had been in contention but not able to capitalize for a victory, said he didn’t know how to describe his feelings.
“I don’t know what the word is or how to describe it, but just a little dejected or — I don’t know, like, maybe like maybe looking to go in a different direction,” he said.
This from one of the best in the world. Was he thinking of becoming a Peloton trainer? Going to be a full-time dad? Joining Golf Channel, NBC or CBS? No, none of those. Golf, you see, has been driving him a little bit crazy lately. If you play, you understand.
McIlroy’s struggle with his game has been obvious to all who have watched him in the last 12 months. Finally, on Tuesday at The Players, he was able to explain a little bit more to media about what has him concerned.
“It’s funny, I’d almost feel better if my game was worse,” he said. “It’s the inconsistency of I shot 66 on Thursday and thought, I’ve got it, I feel really good, and then I didn’t quite have it. The ups and downs are just a little too much.”
He said that he knows he can produce good golf, which he called the good stuff. He said that’s always going to be there. What’s a problem is not being able make the best out of a bad round. Even if his game was off, he said he has nearly always been able to post a score under par, and recently that hasn’t been the case. He said he felt like he was treading water.
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Golfers are always trying to minimize the bad shots and eliminate the big numbers. For instance, it’s seldom we see a golfer of McIlroy’s caliber hit two balls into the lake on the 6th at Bay Hill which he did on Sunday.
His swing, he said, is going through an unusual pattern. It all has to do with his swing plane, and unfortunately that can mean different things to different people. Most often, people say to imagine a giant slice of air—sometimes people talk about it being like a pane of glass — created by the arc the club shaft makes in the backswing and then the arc it makes in the downswing. That’s what you see in the Ben Hogan Five Fundamentals book.
But some people mean the shape the clubhead makes during the swing when they say plane, and some mean the way the shoulders rotate, and so forth. So precisely which of those McIlroy is troubled by requires some fuller investigation.
However, what he said about his plane is that in the past, it has been what he calls in front of him on the way back and then it drops below the backswing plane on the way forward.
“At the minute it’s the opposite,” he said. “It sort of gets behind me early and then I sort of throw it back out in front of me on the way down.”
That sounds like, what they call in instructional articles, coming over the top, at least as he described it. (But I’m not a good enough swing expert to be sure.)
Whatever it is, McIlroy said it’s totally different than any swing issue he’s ever had, and he doesn’t yet know how to manage it.
“I know for years and years, my whole golf career, I’ve got used to dropping it underneath the plane on the way down, and from there I can manage it,” he noted.
Right now, the plane of his swing is making life difficult. Worst yet, he said it’s giving him a two-way miss. He might do a tweak one week to fix a problem, but it might not work the next week. Pretty soon, you’ve tweaked yourself into some weird pattern that you didn’t even know you had.
Right now, he just needs to find a way to get back to the swing pattern that worked best for him, the one he had a year or so ago. Hopefully, his coach, Michael Bannon, is nearby.