After firing a first-round 65 at the 50th Players Championship, which included an incredible ten birdies and two penalty shots, McIlroy believes he is swinging well enough to win. In a press conference on Wednesday, he mentioned using two different swings to find his best form.
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‘I have this amazing feeling with my woods at the minute, but when I try to recreate that feeling with the irons it just it starts left and goes further left’ McIlroy says, ‘I love this feeling of firing my right arm down the target line, and I can do that with my Woods really well but then when I try to do that with my irons it like Club face closes over and goes left.’
This is really interesting, and actually, it is fairly common for a golfer to use different swing feelings for different clubs in the bag. Rory McIlroy seems to have found some expert driving form by feeling like, in transition, his arms move further behind him, which would shallow the club out and allow him to hit more from the inside and more up on the ball. This is absolutely why we are seeing McIlroy hit some staggering drives at the moment, driving one of the greens at Bay Hill last week and hitting a driver a whopping 149 feet in the air today.
The reason this swing feel might not work for his irons is that when you drop the club behind you aggressively, you need tremendous body rotation and body speed to pull the club back online for a square hit. This is something you can do when hitting the driver as you generally are moving as quickly as possible, but with iron swings being far more about finesse rather than max speed, the club is getting stuck behind him and, as a result, is flipping his hands over, causing pull hooks.
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‘I have a swing thought for my woods and I need a different swing thought for my irons’ Rory later says. He is using his super-powered draw swing with the driver to be the PGA Tour leader in strokes gained off the tee but has developed more of a neutral to fade swing for his iron shots, which is allowing him to control his irons. Rory Mcilroy’s swing thoughts have led him to 2nd in the strokes gained approach to the green as I’m writing this in the middle of round one, gaining a whopping 3.774 shots on the field with his iron shots alone.
What we can take away here is that it is fine to be doing different things with different clubs to get the best outcomes, and do not stick to one thought if it works with one club but not any others. Golfers often want to make golf as simple as possible by playing and sticking with just one thought, and although this may work for some people, some of the time, more often than not, it just isn’t that simple. The driver and short irons are very different clubs and need different swings. If it works for Rory McIlroy’s swing, it’s good enough for the rest of us!
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