Rory McIlroy has settled on the way to bridge the tournaments between The Masters and the PGA Championship, and some will simply be left out of his schedule.
“For the most part, when I have made an advanced trip, it's worked out well for me,” Rory McIlroy said at his press conference in advance of the PGA. “I remember the first time I did it for a major championship was Congressional in 2011 on the back of a recommendation from Jack Nicklaus.”
In case your memory needs jogging, McIlroy won that tournament. It was his first major victory, the 2011 U.S. Open, and he won it by eight strokes over Jason Day. With the victory, he was exempt from the U.S. Open for 10 years and from the other majors and PGA Tour events for the next five seasons, which is when he made the decision to spend more of his time in the U.S. It’s certainly worked out well for him.
In fact, McIlroy’s done so well that he can jet up to courses like Aronimink for a practice round and jet back home to see his family at the end of the day. That’s exactly what he did on Friday, two weeks ago. Before that trip, he said he had only seen Aronimink in PGA Tour events, the last one being the rain-filled 2018 BMW Championship.
“For the most part, it should be a bit drier, which really brings out the character of the greens,” he explained.
McIlroy felt Aronimink was reminiscent of the Philadelphia Cricket Club, where the PGA Tour held the 2025 Truist Championship since Quail Hollow was hosting the PGA Championship.
“It reminds me a little of that, very wide playing corridors. Still got to get the ball on the fairway. The rough is sort of hit-and-miss, but you can get some bad lies,” he noted.
The course should play right into his hands, if his description of it is on point.
“It's a course where you can be super aggressive off the tee, and then there's a little more strategy and a little more thought going into the greens,” he added. “If you get yourself above the hole or you start to short-side yourself, you can get yourself in some tricky spots.”
Regardless of the challenge, he was fond of the style of the course.
“I like the bunkering. There's a lot of bunkers,” he said. "I think it provides quite a nice bit of variety with shorter par-4s, a couple of longer par-4s. The par-3s, there's three pretty long ones and a shorter one.”
However, it’s not a course, according to McIlroy, where he will use every club in the bag.
“Strategy off the tee is pretty nonexistent. It's, basically, bash driver down there and then figure it out from there, which I think is a lot of these newer -- newly renovated -- I think about Oak Hill in 2023, here -- when these traditional golf courses take a lot of trees out," he suggested. “Getting yourself in the right sections of the greens, making sure you leave yourself below the hole for the most part. That's the key this week."
McIlroy was asked about taking time off, skipping tournaments after his recent victory at The Masters, where he was a back-to-back winner. He said he needed to take some time off to decompress and mentally prepare for the PGA and the U.S. Open.
“I think I came into this tournament last year a little bit sort of uncertain of what my future was -- just like I conquered this thing that I wanted to conquer for so long, and I was a little bit -- you know, I still hadn't really reset goals or found whatever that motivation was to keep going or go forward,” he explained. “It probably took me a good few months to get to that point.”
He also cited what he called the compressed schedule, the change since the PGA has moved to May. He sees it as having big events from April to July instead of April to August.
“Honestly, since the tournament has moved to May, my results haven't been that great here at the PGA,” he admitted. “It's a much more condensed schedule than it used to be. We used to go from April to the end of August. It's now April to the middle of July.”
Then it’s the FedEx Cup finish and the Tour Championship in August.
However, as far as skipping tournaments, he said he will not ever skip Quail Hollow, which was the site of his first victory in the U.S. in 2010.
“It's a place I love to play. It's one of my favorite tournaments of the year, and it seems like that is going to be the event leading into this week,” he said.
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