Media Center Interviews
April 4, 2024
First Round Interview with Rory McIlroy
Q. Rory, we talked yesterday, you said you were looking for a little consistency with your iron game. How would you grade that today?
RORY McILROY: Yeah, I thought it was a little better. Yeah, it was good. The miss I was struggling with the last few weeks has been a left miss with the irons and if anything, most of my misses today were to the right, so it was actually a pretty good thing. I'd much rather miss it to the right at the minute than miss it to the left.
Yeah, I thought I played pretty well, hit some nice shots, played pretty consistently. I think it's the first round I've had without a bogey in quite a while. My game over the last couple months has been quite volatile, so to go out there and play a solid round of golf in pretty tricky conditions, pretty happy with it.
Q. Would it be fair to say that Butch maybe just gave you some clarity?
RORY McILROY: Yeah, or maybe like I think the thing is it's not -- what I'm working on or what I've been trying to do the last couple weeks is no different than what I've been trying to do previously, he just sort of gave me a different way to do it. That's sort of the -- you know, you could tell someone five different things and like for the same feel -- like to a piece of a swing, but sometimes none of them resonated, sometimes all of them, sometimes one thing. It's just one of those things over the past few months that nothing was resonating with me. He gave me a tiny little something that I went with and, as I said, it's felt a little better over the last two weeks and felt pretty good out there.
Q. No. 8, I'm sure it happened to you before on Tour, but what's going through your mind when that ball is hanging the lip?
RORY McILROY: Yeah, I backed off the ball twice because of the wind. I could feel the wind at my back, so I'm like do I play the wind, do I not play the wind? When I ended up hitting the putt, there wasn't really a ton of wind there and I thought I missed it on the left side. Obviously the ball hung on the edge and I was just hoping for a gust of wind to come to blow it in and thankfully it did before the 10-second mark.
Q. That's happened to you before, right?
RORY McILROY: Yeah, it has, it has happened to me before.
