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Rory McIlroy’s first task at Royal Birkdale ahead of the 154th Open Championship is to fix one of the oldest problems in links golf.
To stop the wind from wrecking his golf swing.
You can see Rory get to work on the R&A’s fantastic Live on the Range YouTube broadcast from Monday below.
Rory’s problem to solve, in theory at least, is fairly simple:
Rory likes to see a subtle draw. That was his stock shot shape growing up, and his general comfort zone.
The problem heading into the Open Championship started on the range of the Genesis Scottish Open, which had a strong left-to-right wind blowing across it. This is a common hazard in professional golf, and when it happens, players instinctively start hitting bigger shapes to compensate so their stock shot looks like their stock shot.
Then they get on the course, and it all goes wrong. Now the wind is different, and they realise the hard way what just happened: That the range wind was screwing with them.
In Rory’s case, it led him into his golf swing’s bad habit. He began swinging too far to the right, with a clubface too left relative to it. His small draw was now producing ugly left shots that were being masked by the range and exposed on the course.
As Rory himself explained:
“I just need to hit some balls in a right-to-left wind. That usually helps me. Again, it’s the same thing that I get a lot when I start hitting balls in a left-to-right wind like it has been over the weekend. My path and my face just get too far apart, in terms of like my face is just the further left than my path is and I start hitting these left shots, especially with the irons…I just get into that bad habit of hitting it further left than the path at impact.”
The good news is that he knows what went wrong—all that’s left is figuring out how to fix it.
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