Rory McIlroy long ago decided to skip the RBC Heritage, a decision borne out of his otherwise indifference to Harbour Town Golf Links and his stated desire to cut back on his schedule in 2025.
While that decision undoubtedly came as a disappointment to PGA Tour brass who would prefer that all the top players compete in the signature events, perhaps they might now be just fine with the reigning Masters champion returning this week.
Sure, it would have been nice to ride the wave of McIlroy’s victory into the sleepy Hilton Head tournament, where Scottie Scheffler was the defending champion. But the Tour was blessed with a solid leaderboard nonetheless, and saw two-time major champion Justin Thomas prevail for the first time in nearly three years with a playoff victory over Andrew Novak.
And now McIlroy returns at what has otherwise been a check-out week for a good number of PGA Tour fans with the Zurich Classic of New Orleans. The two-man team event has done well to think outside the box and bring an alternative format to the game but has generally seen a falloff in interest after the intense lead-up to the Masters, knowing that a strong run of tournaments is ahead, including another signature event followed by the PGA Championship.
McIlroy gave the tournament a boost last year when he and Shane Lowry won the tournament, all but assuring their return this year.
While McIlroy will undoubtedly be asked to comment on what’s next—can he win two majors in a row? Can he equal the six of another European golfer, Nick Faldo, or the European leader, Harry Vardon, who won seven long before there was a Masters?
Seems a lot easier to talk about than that 11-year journey to the career Grand Slam and winning a fifth major.
“It was a heavy weight to carry, and thankfully now I don’t have to carry it and it frees me up and I know I’m coming back here every year, which is lovely,” McIlroy said at Augusta National after his win. “I’ve just become more accustomed to the noise that sort of surrounds my whole Masters week and I’ve become a little more comfortable with it.”
Perhaps a subject that won’t come up: getting to victory No. 30 on the PGA Tour.
McIlroy has won three times this year to run his total to 29, and he’s among some rare air these days. Getting to 30 PGA Tour wins is going to become more and more difficult, and it is only heightened by how few have done it over the past 40-plus years.
Phil Mickelson was the last player to get to 30 wins when he won at Pebble Beach in 2007—18 years ago—on his way to 45 wins. Earlier that year, Vijay Singh won for the 30th time when he captured the Mercedes-Benz Championship on his way to 34 career victories.
Before that? Tiger Woods won his 30th of 82 the Arnold Palmer Invitational in 2002; Tom Watson won his 30th (of 39) 20 years prior to that when he won at Hilton Head in 1982.
Jack Nicklaus won his 30th (of 73) in 1969 at the Kaiser International tournament. Before that, Billy Casper won his 30th of 51 when he defeated Arnold Palmer in a playoff at the 1966 U.S. Open.
McIlroy is now tied with Gene Littler and Lee Trevino with 29 PGA Tour victories. Of the 17 players ahead of him, only four—Woods, Mickelson, Watson and Singh—have achieved 30 wins and beyond in the last 55 years.
LIV Golf heads to Mexico City
LIV Golf returns this week in Mexico City at a venue familiar to many in the field—Chapultepec Golf Club, the former home to the WGC Mexico Championship from 2017 to 2020.
The tournament could not be played there in 2021 due to COVID-19 restrictions and was then moved to Florida for a one-year run before the event was no longer played.
The winners of the four WGC events at the high-altitude course all play for LIV Golf now—Dustin Johnson won in 2017 and 2019, Phil Mickelson defeated Justin Thomas in a playoff in 2018 and Patrick Reed captured the title in 2020 by a stroke over Bryson DeChambeau just weeks before the COVID-19 shutdown.
It is also an important event for players who are not exempt for the U.S. Open. LIV Golf goes to South Korea next week and the player among the top three in LIV Golf’s season-long points who is not otherwise exempt will earn a place in the U.S. Open at Oakmont.
Joaquin Niemann currently leads Sergio Garcia by seven points, with 2021 U.S. Open champion Jon Rahm in third place and Marc Leishman fourth.
The winner of LIV Golf event earns 40 points, with second place getting 30 and third getting 24 with a sliding scale of points down to 21 through 24 which get 1 point each.
JT’s Shoutout to Xander
Justin Thomas’s victory at the RBC Heritage in a playoff over Andrew Novak saw a strong putting performance. For the week, Thomas rated third in the field in strokes-gained putting, an area of his game that had given him fits, especially as he went through nearly three years without winning.
This year, Thomas ranks 24th on the PGA Tour in that category after finishing at 174th last year. (He is fourth on the PGA Tour this year in strokes-gained total.)
Turns out, Thomas sought some help in the offseason from Xander Schauffele, the winner of two major championships last year.
“Obviously it’s a lot of work and time spent on it,” Thomas explained after his victory. “I called Xander at the end of last year because I think he's one of the best putters in fundamentals and not just putting but everything and I was just like, “Can I just pick your brain for like two or three hours, just talk to you about putting.”
“So he came out with me, and he just was asking me a bunch of different questions. You guys obviously know Xander, but he doesn't leave any box unchecked. He's going to—like he said that day, if it has anything to do with you potentially improving in golf, I've probably done it or tried it.”
It is not unusual for players to help each other with all aspects of the game, but it appears Schauffele put some effort into this, according to Thomas.
“So I just was talking to him about this process and how he reads greens and how he sees things and his practice and everything, and it honestly was just being with him, and he would kind of ask something and I was like, yeah, I used to do that,” Thomas said. “And then he was like, well, how about something like this. Like, I used to use the string line here. O.K.
“The more I was talking, I’m like, I don’t do any of the things that I used to do in my best putting years. 2017-18, I was very, very regimented of the things that I did, and how he said it is I had a home base and I had no home base. I had things that I did, but it was a very vague bag of things and there was no consistency to it.
“I feel like I used to have a very good home base of fundamentals and things that I did.
“So it honestly, while he helped, it was more of the questions he asked me and made me realize that I’m trying basically too hard and I’m trying too many different things versus I think it’s a serious, serious, serious skill to continue to work on the things that you do really well and not doing it differently, and I think that’s been more of what it is. I have my fundamentals and things that I do and checkpoints, and I’m sticking to them.”
Schauffele downplayed his role but noticed the results at Harbour Town.
“He played great and I don’t really think I had anything do with it. He maybe gave me too much credit,” Schauffele said Monday on a conference call for the PGA Championship. “He was asking me some questions and then it ended up me being the one asking him all the questions. He was searching and maybe trying too hard. He’s done so many good things in the past. He realized he used to do these three, four or five things and the answers were right in front of him.”
It reminds of Tiger Woods seeking help from Steve Stricker at the 2013 WGC Cadillac Championship. Woods was struggling with his putting and spent a considerable amount of time prior to the tournament with Stricker on the putting green.
“Well, whatever he says, I’m going to do,” Woods said. “He’s one of the best putters that’s ever lived.”
Woods had one of the best putting weeks of his career, taking 100 putts overall. And he won the tournament—by two strokes over Stricker.
Jack on Rory
Prior to Masters week, Jack Nicklaus met with Rory McIlroy and asked him to describe how he’d play all of the holes at Augusta National. During a Thursday morning news conference that took place while the first round was underway, Nicklaus—after hitting the ceremonial opening tee shot along with Gary Player and Tom Watson— disclosed that he thought McIlroy’s assessment was spot on.
“Don’t do dumb things,” was Nicklaus’s message to McIlroy, which he explained again last week at a luncheon in advance of next month’s Memorial Tournament, which he hosts.
Nicklaus used the occasion to compare it to the way his beloved Ohio State Buckeyes lost to rival Michigan in the last regular season game of the season—only to then go on and win the national championship in the expanded playoff.
“What in the world was your game plan (against) Michigan,” Nicklaus wondered in front of a pro-Buckeye audience.
Nicklaus returned to the Masters conversation when he also noted that while at times McIlroy abandoned the safer-than-sorry approach, he mostly stuck to what they discussed. “I wouldn’t change a thing,” Nicklaus told McIlroy. “That’s exactly how I would try to play the golf course.”
Nicklaus, who won the Masters six times and became the fourth player to complete the career Grand Slam when he won the British Open in 1966 at age 26, said he was as shocked as anyone when McIlroy hit his third shot into the water at the par-5 13th when he had led by four shots only moments prior.
That wasn’t a mistake of planning but execution, he said.
“He played absolutely the right shot,” by laying up on at the 13th, Nicklaus said. “He just played a very, very poor third shot. He knows where that shot has to go. I cannot believe he let it squirt out to the right. I don’t care what he does. Chunk it onto the green. The ball is going to roll down to the hole, but you cannot do what he did. Pardon the expression, that’s a brain fart.”
That double bogey was followed by a bogey at the 14th hole, and when Justin Rose birdied the 16th hole ahead of him, McIlroy was a shot behind. He played the final four holes aggressively, making two birdies before a closing bogey—he missed the green at the 18th with a wedge—which led to the playoff McIlroy won on the first extra hole.
“Rory didn’t shoot himself out of the tournament, because he is so talented, and hit so many good shots to overcome it,” Nicklaus said. “He continued to come back. I give him a world of credit. He had the whole golfing world and mountains on his shoulders, and now he’s gotten rid of them.”
McIlroy joined Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Nicklaus and Tiger Woods as one of only six players to win a career Grand Slam—victories in all four of the modern major championships.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Rory McIlroy Is Back This Week and Has Another Career Milestone to Chase.
