During television coverage of the first round in Abu Dhabi on Thursday the commentators briefly discussed how the new regulations on square grooves would impact on the elite players. Generating spin out of the rough will be far more difficult now and all of them will have to adjust to this loss of control. It was mentioned in passing, though, that Rory McIlory would be less put out than all of the other top players because he’s only been a professional for a little over two years. He can’t have been using square grooves for long.
Watching from Bangor Golf Club, McIlroy’s coach Michael Bannon couldn’t help a smile. McIlroy has been spinning the golf ball with square grooves on his irons since he was nine years old. Square grooves are what the pros used. They could see no reason to use anything else.
As a new season dawns manipulating the ball out of the rough will be the least of McIlroy’s worries. The greatest challenge will be to ignore the altitude he has already reached and keep climbing. It is a truism in golf commentary to say that he will reach the summit of the game but what he faces now is the stiffest and most treacherous part of the climb.
He started last year with the goal of reaching the world’s top 10, being a tournament winner and a contender at the majors. By the end of the season he had ticked all those boxes but had done so in a way that suggested he could have done more while he was at it. It would be unfair to say that about any other 20-year-old finding his feet in the professional game but McIlroy’s talent and his temperament are so extraordinary that normal criteria are suspended. His desire to be the best is freighted with those conditionsIn crude terms, he needs to convert more of his winning opportunities and he needs to be a better putter. When he won so early last year — January — it was reasonable to expect that he would do so again and that failure coloured his reflections on the season too.
“Yeah, he would have been disappointed with that,” says Bannon. “If he had won another one it would have been OK. It’s about learning how to get over the line. He needs to convert more of his top fives into wins. That’s what will take him to the next level.”
It wasn’t that he folded on the last day. Far from it. On his three major appearances in the States he posted his best round of the week on Sunday. On the regular tour there were three occasions when he had a winning chance going into the final round, improved his position on the last day and still didn’t win. And not all of his top fives were missed opportunities either: two of them came when he trailed by nine shots after three rounds. But it is easy to identify three events where he was in a stalking position on the final day and couldn’t hunt down his prey.
After such a terrific year his putting numbers were telling. He finished second on the money list in Europe with an average of 30 putts a round which ranked him at 111th in the putting statistics. It suggests a parallel with Sergio Garcia that McIlroy desperately needs to knock on the head. Like McIlroy, Garcia came out on tour as a teenager with a spectacular talent and, like McIlroy, his ball-striking is an ornament on the game but destructive putting has been the impediment between Garcia and major titles.
He has consistently averaged more than 29 putts a round in his career and in the last two seasons on the US Tour his finishing from inside five feet and from inside 10 feet has been outside the top 100 in the statistics. With those putts tournaments are won and lost.
After the 2008 Irish Open at Adare Manor McIlroy was so frustrated with his putting that he started working with a specialist coach, Dr Paul Hurrion, who lists Padraig Harrington among his clients. Hurrion could see the problem: “He was relying an awful lot on hand-eye co-ordination and science basically tells us that you can’t rely on hand-eye co-ordination to get you through time after time.”
The outcome of the analysis was an hour-long drill that McIlroy has taken with him to the practice green for the last 18 months but he hasn’t closed his mind to other coaching aids. Towards the end of last season he started listening to a Bob Rotella audio book, ‘Putting Out of Your Mind.’ For a player as beautifully natural as McIlroy it reflected the conflict between feel and received correctness.
“I just feel like I need to free everything up,” McIlroy said at the time. “I still work with Dr Paul Hurrion but I just need to let it flow a little more. Obviously, when you are thinking about mechanics the way Paul teaches, you can get a little bit wooden. So I am just trying to free it all up.”
Bannon is convinced that he’s getting on top of it: “He made a few changes in his putting and he’s in a good place with that now. He putted better at the end of last year and he will continue to improve. It’s the result of a lot of hard work. One of the things he does is make a chalk line on the green and keep trying to make putts from 10 feet. In practice he can hole about 100 in a row.”
Going into the final day at Abu Dhabi, one shot behind, with another chance to win, that’s the kind of roll he needs.
McILORY IN EUROPE 2009
Stroke average 69.51 (1st)
Driving accuracy 63% (66th)
Driving distance 301.4yds (5th)
Greens in regulation 78.1% (3rd)
Putts per greens in regulation 1.761 (20th)
Putts per round 30 (111th)
Sand saves 66.2% (9th).
Source:The Times
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