Rory McIlroy opened the PGA Championship with a 4-over 74 at Aronimink Golf Club on Thursday, leaving him seven shots behind the leaders after a first round that quickly turned into damage control. He found only five fairways, and the misses kept piling up.
The round started badly and never really recovered. McIlroy missed right on the 10th hole, drew a terrible lie, advanced the ball only 70 yards and made bogey. He then missed right again on the fourth, sixth, seventh and ninth holes, bogeying all four. The reigning Masters champion said afterward that his driver was the problem. “I'm just not driving the ball well enough,” he said. “It's been a problem all year for the most part. Yeah, I've sort of got, like I miss it right, and then I want to try to correct it. And then I'll overdo it, and I'll miss it left. It's a bit of back-and-forth that way. So that's pretty frustrating, especially when like, I pride myself on driving the ball well.”
That frustration carried a familiar edge. McIlroy said the feeling after Thursday’s round was similar to what he felt in the opening round of last year’s PGA Championship, when he shot 74 at Quail Hollow and went on to finish T47. Since the event moved from August to May in 2019, he has not finished better than seventh in the PGA Championship, a run that has made this tournament one of the few major stages where his game has not quite matched his résumé.
That is what made Thursday’s opening round so jarring. McIlroy leads the PGA TOUR in Strokes Gained: Off the Tee this season, but he said the driver has been slipping on him when the pressure rises. “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. Just sort of, once I get under the gun, it just seems like it starts to go a little bit wayward on me.”
Scoring was difficult at Aronimink on Thursday, so McIlroy was hardly alone in facing a stern test. But his start mattered because he arrived as the reigning Masters champion and one of the clear names to watch in the championship. Instead, he opened with a round that put him immediately on the back foot and raised the same question that has followed him through too many majors: whether the driver that so often powers his best golf will hold up when the round starts counting.
For now, the answer from day one was no. McIlroy did not need much explanation after nine holes of missed fairways and bogeys to understand where the round went off track, and the leaderboard reflected it. The larger test now is whether he can turn one rough opening round into something better before the gap in front of him grows too large to close.
