Rory McIlroy walked into the BMW Championship with a swing he said had gone off track. He walked out of Thursday’s first round with a six-under 64 and a share of the lead.
That is the kind of shift that sends readers straight to PGA scores. McIlroy had finished 66th out of 68 players at the FedEx St. Jude Championship the week before, then answered with a round that put him right back in the mix at Bellerive Country Club. The turnaround mattered because it came immediately, not after a long rebuild. It came after McIlroy spent Monday at home in Florida working with Michael Bannon and Harry Diamond, then hit 313 balls across Tuesday and Wednesday while trying to sort out a swing he said had drifted into bad habits.
The work was not abstract. McIlroy said he had made a couple of clubs up with different grips to help him feel where his hands should be halfway back. One of them was a lob wedge, the other a 7-iron, each fitted with a Flat Cat putter grip at a 45-degree angle. The point was simple enough for a player who lives by feel: he wanted a clearer sense of where the club should be in the swing, and he wanted his right arm to work better through it. He said the setup gives the club more support at the top and leaves him feeling as if he can “really hit whatever shot” he wants from there.
That is why the opening-round 64 carried more weight than a hot start usually does. McIlroy was not talking about a minor tweak for comfort. He was trying to correct swing habits that had crept in over several months, and he put the experiment into tournament play almost immediately after the range work. The result held up well enough on Friday, too, when he shot a 69 and stayed close to the top.
The one thing it did not settle was whether the fix is finished. McIlroy started Saturday’s third round five strokes behind Wyndham Clark, which means the scorecard at the BMW Championship is still open to a fuller test of whether the modified grips and the hours on the range can hold under pressure. For now, the answer is that they worked once, worked again in part, and turned a bad week into a live chance in the space of four days.
