Rory McIlroy: “He’s been knocking on the door for so long”

Question: If you could wave a magic wand, what area of your game would you improve overnight?
RORY McILROY: My iron play. Yeah, my iron play hasn’t been great since coming back from the lockdown. It sort of goes right through the bag. It goes from wedges all the way through to the long irons. I had two 5 irons from the fairway on 10 and 11 today, for example, and just didn’t hit great shots. It’s something to there’s always stuff to work on, but definitely something to work on going into the off season that we have here, and try to come out a little better in 2021.

Q: As you’ve had a little more time to reflect on what happened Thursday, what went wrong?
RORY McILROY: Again, I said yesterday, I just got a little careful, a little tentative, a little guidey, just didn’t trust my swing, didn’t commit to what I was doing, and again, this course more
than any other can make you do that at times. That was really what it was.
The first day I actually did okay. I was even par. It wasn’t even par through 9 here is not that bad, and then just that second morning I just didn’t quite have it. I guess I need to take the
positives, and played the last 54 really well and only made two bogeys in that 54 hole stretch, which is probably the best run of golf I’ve played here.

Rory McIlroy: “I miss the fans a lot”

Q: What did you miss the most this week, just the difference of playing in November?
RORY McILROY: Yeah, the atmosphere, the crowds, the patrons, the feelings that you normally have here that you didn’t quite have. More than any other week of the year I feel like you’re nervous a little more often, and it didn’t quite have that. Not saying it’s a bad thing; I loved the feeling of being relaxed out there and it’s something I probably need to try to adopt
going into five months’ time.

Q: Do you think there’s any advantage to coming right back here in April?
RORY McILROY: Yeah I mean, look, I hope the course is much different in April than it is now. It’s very soft. It’s very I feel like there’s a lot of shots I hit this week where I hit my number and
it would spin back off a green or it just wouldn’t do what you expect it to do, so I’d love to get another shot at it in April and have the course play maybe more what we’re accustomed to.

Q: You’re obviously a multiple major champion. What do you think this is going to mean to Dustin?
RORY McILROY: Yeah, he’s been knocking on the door so long, and I think, again, since coming back out of sort of back in June, the lockdown, he has been by far the best player in the world. He’s won a few times, won a FedExCup, had a chance at Harding Park. And I think, yeah, it validates what he did at Oakmont a few years ago and he’s had so many chances and hasn’t quite been able to close the deal, but his resume speaks for itself, how many times he’s won on the PGA TOUR, how consistent he’s been. I played with him the first two days here. He’s got the ball on a string. It was really impressive.

Q: What are you going to do this off season to kind of get away from golf and reboot? Any TV shows you’re going to catch up on?
RORY McILROY: Yeah, not particularly. I don’t know. I’m just going to be a man of leisure for a couple months. It’s going to be nice. Lie by the pool a little bit, get back on the bike, get back
on the Peloton. I’ve sort of given that a bit of a miss over the last few months. Yeah, just some stuff. Obviously watch my daughter grow up a little bit and have fun with that. But yeah, I’ll try
to get away from it, but yeah, as I said before, there’s certainly some stuff in my golf game that I want to work on before next year.

Q: Is there anything in DJ’s personality from your close interaction with him or traveling with him that you’ve seen of him that maybe we don’t that maybe you could share?
RORY McILROY: He’s smarter than you think.

Q: How so?
RORY McILROY: He’s switched on, more so than he lets on, more so than everyone in the media thinks. I’ll just put it that way.