NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. (AP) — The blister on Rory McIlroy's right pinky toe was the least of his worries Thursday in the PGA Championship. And it certainly didn't cause him as much pain as staring a scorecard that featured five bogeys over his last six holes.
He struggled mightily off the tee, a recipe for trouble at Aronimink. He was tentative over his putts, with three misses from the 7-foot range that could have made him feel a lot better.
The result
was a 4-over 74 that left McIlroy chasing the wrong kind of history as the Masters champion goes for the second leg of the calendar Grand Slam. Not since the late Payne Stewart in 1989 has a player started the PGA Championship with a 74 and gone on to win.
The question by a PGA of America moderator when it was over sounded innocuous: “How would you describe your opening round?” The response was one word. A four-letter stinky word.
McIlroy had said earlier this week at Aronimink that “strategy off the tee is pretty nonexistent. It's basically bash driver down there and then figure it out from there."
He never quite figured it out Thursday.
McIlroy was hanging around par for so much of the day, right there with Jordan Spieth and Jon Rahm in his group, not bad golf given the testing conditions at Aronimink.
But he started missing fairways — a lot of them.
His lone bogey on his front nine came on the opening hole from the right rough — he managed to only get that scooting down the fairway. But the miss to the right on the par-4 fourth (his 13th of the day) cost him another bogey. He holed a 30-foot birdie putt on the par-3 fifth. All was well.
And then it wasn't.
“I missed the fairway right on 4, the fairway right on 6, the fairway right on 7, fairway right on 9,” he said. "From there, it’s hard. I didn’t have great angles, either. Then obviously you start missing it just off the edges of these greens, it gets tricky.
“I just got on that bogey train at the end.”
McIlroy also opened with a 74 at Quail Hollow in the PGA Championship last year, his first round as the Masters champion. The frustrations were different. A year ago, he was irritated about learning the face of his driver had become too thin to conform to regulations (and then even more irritated when the news was leaked to the media without context).
This was simply a weakness in his game he thought he had corrected.
“I’m just not driving the ball well enough. It’s been a problem all year for the most part,” McIlroy said. “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 little bit of back and forth that way. So that’s pretty frustrating, especially when I pride myself on driving the ball well.”
He hit only five of the 14 fairways. He was in the short grass on No. 1 after making the turn. He played from the rough the rest of the round. McIlroy was in the hay right of the seventh hole and could only manage to hack that across the fairway into more rough on the left, leaving him 15 feet for par that he didn't convert.
His final hole was the par-5 ninth, another drive that sailed right. From there, he put it in the worst spot — a bunker 67 yards from the pin — and barely got that onto the green, leaving him 70 feet a way for birdie. He ran that 8 feet by and missed it coming back.
As for that blister causing problems, McIlroy offered another one-word answer: “No.”
This was about his driver, mainly, which McIlroy felt good about after his final round Sunday in the Truist Championship, and the 12 holes of practice at Aronimink he played this week.
“I honestly thought I’d figured it out,” he said. “Just once I get under the gun, it just seems like it starts to go a little bit wayward on me.”
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