Rory McIlroy enters The PLAYERS Championship as the defending champion after winning the tournament in 2019.
The tournament was canceled after the first round last year because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Following are excerpts compiled by ACES editor Dennis Miller from McIllroy’s Tuesday virtual press conference from the tournament.
JACK RYAN: We’d like to welcome defending champion Rory McIlroy to THE PLAYERS Championship. Rory returns as the defending champion after the 2020 event was canceled. Four top 10s this season, including both major championships and each of his last two starts. If we could just get an opening comment.
RORY McILROY: Yeah, I guess it’s nice, like I get another bite at the cherry. Last year was obviously very surreal, difficult. Yeah, I think at least we know this year the tournament is not going to be canceled, unless something pretty crazy happens again.
Yeah, it’s good to be back. I feel like THE PLAYERS Championship being back to its original date of March really has a nice feel to it. I think the golf course plays really well. The conditions out here this week are absolutely perfect. Everyone is happy to be back and happy that we’re going to get a four-round tournament in this year.
Q. Obviously as you mentioned, you’re still the defending champion and you’re no longer nine shots behind Hideki Matsuyama. How does that make you feel going into the week?
RORY McILROY: I think I feel a bit better about that than Hideki does. If I felt for anyone last year because of all this, it was Hideki. That was obviously a hell of an opening round. I birdied my last three holes to shoot even par, so it could have been a lot worse, as well.
Yeah, it sort of feels weird that it’s two years removed from winning but still the defending champion. But it’s nice, as I said, to be back, and hopefully I can get off to a better start than I did last year, shoot something in the 60s, not be too far away from the lead and try to build on that.
I guess it’s just nice to be back. It’s been a year since the world changed, and I think everyone here in terms of the players that are playing are just grateful that we’re back doing what we want to do, which is playing golf and trying to win tournaments.
Q. You sounded a little dejected on Sunday night at Bay Hill. Was that just a spur of the moment, knee jerk thing or are you feeling you do need a spark to get you going this season?
RORY McILROY: Yeah, I think it was just me walking off the course not having my best day and I guess sort of venting a little bit to whoever was there at the time. So that was really it.
Look, I did feel dejected. I felt disappointed. I think one of the biggest things is, it’s funny, I’d almost feel better if my game was worse, but it’s the inconsistency of I shot 66 on Thursday and thought, I’ve got it, I feel really good, and then I didn’t quite have it. The ups and downs are just a little too much.
I think that’s where I’m sort of struggling to come to terms with it and sort of trying to figure out what I need to do because the good stuff is there. It always will be. I’ll always be able to figure it out and find a way.
But it’s when it goes slightly off, how do you manage that and how do you — I feel like over the last few years, I’ve been really good at when my game hasn’t been fully there still be able to shoot 69, 70, still being able to get it under par, where I feel like the last few weeks when it hasn’t felt quite right, I’m sort of treading water and I’m just trying to shoot even par, and that was sort of what it felt like last week.
Just trying to get the bad golf a little better because the good golf is always there and the good shots will always be in there. It’s just when you’re not feeling quite 100 percent, that’s when you need to just be able to manage it a little better, and I just haven’t managed it well over the last few weeks.
Q. You mentioned this does kind of feel like the one-year anniversary, at least in the golf world, of the pandemic hitting. With that in mind and also with the caveat that obviously there are people out there who are struggling way, way more than PGA TOUR players, how has this last year been extra challenging compared to years in the past as far as life on TOUR?
RORY McILROY: Yeah, look, there’s been — again, it’s hard to sit here and complain because we have it way better than a lot of other people in the world. I think it’s all relative. There’s been challenges. There’s been maybe having to get to tournaments a day earlier to get tested, obviously all the COVID protocols, maybe the challenge for some people not having fans out there and the atmosphere of tournaments being not as good as it usually is.
But in the grand scheme of things, they’re not challenges. It hasn’t — it would be very — I think it would be wrong of me to sit here and say that life has been hard for the past year because I recognize and I think everyone else out here on TOUR recognizes that we’ve been very lucky compared to the vast majority of people that have had to live through this.
Q. Do you ever sort of think back to this week last year, because it was quite surreal? We sort of arrived there, we knew about this virus, but didn’t really think it was going to affect us, and then it all seemed to happen so quickly that the world changed in 24 hours. Do you ever think back to this week last year?
RORY McILROY: I do. I mean, it is, it’s the anniversary of where the world really changed, especially the sporting world, what happened in the NBA and then every other sport sort of followed what they did.
Yeah, I mean, it’s funny, at the start of the week you had people sort of fist bumping or elbowing and I’m sort of thinking, what are these people doing, like this is stupid. And then five days later the world shuts down.
Yeah, it’s amazing, and to think that we’re a year into it and we’re still having to do certain things. I mean, obviously back in the UK the vaccine rollout is going incredibly well, which is great to see, and that bodes well for hopefully sporting events and golf tournaments being staged there in the summer.
But yeah, it’s surreal. I was saying to someone yesterday, it’s felt like an incredibly slow 12 months, but at the same time it’s gone really fast. I can’t believe we’re back here already. But happy that we are back and happy that we get to play.
Q. Just curious, when you come off a week or a day where you maybe weren’t happy with how you played, take Sunday Bay Hill as one example of what you touched on earlier, how do you go about kind of analyzing that? Do you look at stats? Do you just practice more stuff that felt off? Do you just have a few glasses of wine and forget about it? What’s your routine?
RORY McILROY: All of the above. Certainly had a couple glasses of wine and watched a pretty compelling interview on Sunday night.
Yeah, I think you have to go — I sort of alluded to this a little bit earlier, that it felt so good on Thursday and then felt off a little bit on the weekend, so it’s like what happened, what changed, what is the difference. I think that’s where I’ve sort of struggled the last few weeks is that inconsistency of the good being very good, good enough to lead the golf tournament, but when it just gets slightly off, not being able to manage it.
I think from thinking over the last couple days where my swing is, it’s an unusual pattern for me. Usually what happens is the club gets out in front of me on the way back and then drops behind me on the way down, where at the minute it’s the opposite, it sort of gets behind me early and then I sort of throw it back out in front of me on the way down, so it’s a completely different pattern that I’m having to manage and one that I’m not used to managing, so it’s just been a different — I know for years and years my whole golf career I’ve got used to dropping it underneath the plane on the way down, and from there I can manage it. I can hold it off. I’m used to that feeling. But this feeling that I have at the minute, I’m not used to managing it, so that’s where the two-way miss comes in, and that’s where I just have to figure out what to do to get it back to a familiar pattern.
Q. When you look at athletes in other sports, whether it’s NBA, Major League Baseball, tennis, when they reach an elite level, as long as they stay relatively healthy, they seem to continue to sort of be their dominant selves. Golf is much different than way. You see guys get to the top of the world, and you know the feeling, and Jordan Spieth is feeling that feeling a little bit the last year and a half and Rickie Fowler is going through it. What is it about golf? Is it more of a mental game than anything else that causes sometimes elite players to suddenly go into slumps that you don’t see happen with athletes in most of the other major sports?
RORY McILROY: Yeah, so I think there’s — so yeah, you mentioned golf is more mental than some of those other sports. The only thing I can really — the only sports that I can compare golf to is tennis because they’re both individual sports, even though golf you’re playing against yourself and tennis you’re obviously playing against an opponent on the other side of the net. In tennis you’ve got the dimensions of the court are always the same, the surface of the court might change if you go hard court or grass or clay or whatever, but I think it’s — yeah, it’s just more mental.
I think like tennis, for example, you can control what your opponent does. If you know that this guy has got a weak backhand you’re just going to hit it to his backhand all day. You can’t really do that in golf. If I’m playing against a guy, know that he struggles to turn the ball over from right to left, I can’t just play right-to-left doglegs all day and tell him to do that.
It’s a little different. You’re basically in a battle against the course and against yourself every single day, and I think there’s a lot more things in golf that are out of your control, golf course, conditions, people just playing better than you on given weeks. So, I think that’s why you see some players get to the top of this game and maybe not be able to sustain it or have little lulls and then come back up again.
You know, that’s why it’s such a compelling sport, because these things do happen, and it’s ever evolving and ever changing.
Q. When you see what’s happening with Jordan, although he’s started to come out of it a little bit, and with Rickie, is this just another reminder to all of us who watch you guys from the outside just how hard golf is to sustain excellence?
RORY McILROY: Yeah, a hundred percent. When Jordan was having his run in ’15 and even Rickie in ’14 and ’15, I’m sure no one thought that five years later, that those guys would be outside the top 50 in the world. I think it does just illustrate how hard it is to sustain that level in golf.
Look, we’ve all been spoiled with Tiger. Tiger is the only one that’s done it for a sustained period of time. Everyone else has had their times, Ernie Els, Vijay Singh, Phil Mickelson, even myself. We’ve all had those great times and then the other times we’ve struggled a little bit or haven’t played to the standard that we’ve set before.
But Tiger is the only one that’s done it year in, year out for a number of years. I think he might have set a benchmark that is obviously ridiculously high. We might see it again. Never say never. But it’s going to take something very special to emulate what he did.