Rory McIlroy opened the PGA Championship with a 4-over 74 on Thursday at Aronimink Golf Club, leaving him seven shots off the pace after a round that never found rhythm. He hit only five fairways and kept missing right, turning a course he had described earlier in the week as a bomb-and-gauge test into a frustrating scramble.
McIlroy’s round began with trouble on the first hole, the 10th, when he missed right, ended up with a horrible lie and had to advance the ball 70 yards before making bogey. The misses kept coming. He went right again on the fourth, sixth, seventh and ninth holes and bogeyed all four.
“I’m just not driving the ball well enough,” McIlroy said after the round. “It’s been a problem all year for the most part.” That is the same part of his game he usually leans on most, and it showed in the numbers: he leads the PGA TOUR in Strokes Gained: Off the Tee this season, even as the tee ball has turned uneven when the pressure is on.
“It’s a bit of back-and-forth that way,” he said. “That’s pretty frustrating, especially when like, I pride myself on driving the ball well.” McIlroy added that he thought he had found the fix. “I honestly thought I’d figured it out,” he said. “Coming in here, I hit it well on Sunday at Quail Hollow, and then hit it good at home on Monday. Then even — obviously I had to curtail the practice round Tuesday, but hit it decent yesterday.”
The problem, McIlroy said, arrives when the round starts to count. “Just sort of, once I get under the gun, it just seems like it starts to go a little bit wayward on me,” he said. That is why Thursday mattered more than an ordinary opening-round number. A 74 does not end a major championship, but it does hand McIlroy immediate work to do at an event where every shot already carries extra weight.
The backdrop is familiar. Since the PGA Championship moved from August to May in 2019, McIlroy has not finished better than seventh. Last year he shot 74 in the opening round at Quail Hollow and finished T47. On a day when scoring was difficult at Aronimink, the chase began for him before the leaderboard had a chance to separate from the field.
McIlroy’s early collapse on the tee leaves the cut line conversation hanging over the rest of his week, not because one round decides a championship, but because his margin has already narrowed. He will need the driver that usually defines him to reappear quickly, or this tournament will become another reminder of how fragile a major can look when the ball starts missing right.
