NEWS FROM THE TOUR VANS
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With his first month-long break in a very busy season, Rory McIlroy took his eye off the ball – literally.
Upon completion of the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship at St. Andrews in early October, McIlroy made an unusual commitment to himself: “I wasn’t going to watch my ball flight for three weeks.”
That didn’t mean the world No. 3 put down his full arsenal of TaylorMade sticks for 21 days before returning to play in Abu Dhabi last week and then Dubai this week for the DP World Tour Championship. Far from it. He grinded harder than ever working on his swing at the Bear’s Club in Florida and a swing studio in New York. He just didn’t watch the outcome of any of his shots.
“I locked myself indoors in, like, a swing studio for three weeks and just hit balls into a blank screen or net and just focused on my swing and focused on the movement of my swing and focused on movement of my body patterns,” he said. “Had a live feed on a TV in front of me of where the club was, and just sort of trying to get the reps in of making the motion that I want to make.”
McIlroy said it’s been a long time coming – at least 18 months – for him to really break down his swing and give it the proper attention. His unusual practice methodology to do that was essential.
“I probably haven’t liked the shape of my golf swing for a while, especially the backswing,” he said. “The only way I was going to make a change or at least move in the right direction with my swing was to lock myself in a studio and not see the ball flight for a bit and just focus entirely on the movement.
“I’m terrible at if I’m trying to make a certain swing or a certain swing change, and I start to mis-strike it or not hit the shots that I want. I’ll just revert back to what I was doing because it’s comfortable. …
“For me, that’s the only way that I’m going to make a swing change. Because if I just hit balls on the range, I’m just going to react to whatever ball flight I’ve just seen. So to not see the ball flight for a while I think has been really important to try to implement some of those little changes, and it’s definitely something that I’ll continue to do after these two weeks into December and going into the new year as well.”
Ten days before teeing it up for real in Abu Dhabi – where he finished T3 with rounds of 67-67-69-64 – McIlroy finally took everything he was working on outside and “started to see the ball flight and get a bit more comfortable with what the ball was doing in the air … still trying to focus on the move that I want to make.”
McIlroy said he feels good about the tweaks he’s implementing, but that it may take months more for it all to “bed in and get back to the shape I want to be in.”
“It’s not necessarily that I couldn’t make the way I was swinging work. It was just that it relied a little bit more on timing and match-ups of my transition and a bunch of different technical things,” he said. “I just wanted to clean it up a little bit. Clean up the motion to make it a little more efficient.
“Still probably a ways to go, but it will be nice to test it out in competition and see how it holds up. … But I think those three weeks were important.”
Scott Michaux