Rory McIlroy’s schedule changes suggest a bigger change

Rory McIlroy is going through some changes.

Some are in his movement. Some are on his schedule. And some are bigger. But if you put together his comments from this week and read a little between the lines? It’s easy to draw these two conclusions about the world number 3:

1. McIlroy is doubling down on himself.

2. He has done favors for the PGA Tour.

Why are any of these interesting? Mainly because they are different. They tell us something about McIlroy, perhaps golf’s greatest star. They also tell us something about professional golf. Here’s why:

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McIlroy arrived in the UAE for this week’s HSBC Championship in Abu Dhabi with a new look and feel golf swing. It belongs to the same golfer, of course, but McIlroy says this is his most significant change in a long time.

“Yeah, I probably haven’t liked the shape of my golf swing for a while, especially the backswing,” McIlroy said before the tournament. That would seem like an extraordinary statement coming from any top golfer, never mind the owner of one of the most coveted golf swings on the planet – but we’re actually used to hearing top golfers talk in this way. Think Victor Hovland reworking his swing after winning the FedEx Cup or Tiger Woods revamping his swing after earning a bundle of diplomas. The swing changes may be cautionary tales, but tinkering is part of the profession, and McIlroy’s 5-under 67 in the first round suggested the changes will come sooner rather than later.

One reason why McIlroy hadn’t made the changes earlier? He had not found time. But for three weeks after Dunhill Links, his most recent event, McIlroy said he locked himself in a swing studio and hit balls on a blank screen, focusing only on body movement. He studied his swing mechanics on a live television broadcast, but completely ignored ball flight in order to avoid real-time feedback and correction. It also felt like a mental reset.

“I think those three weeks were important. I didn’t have time to do that in the last 18 months,” he said.

Specifically, McIlroy said, the changes are meant to “clean up” some imperfections in his swing that have caused him to rely heavily on “timing and putting in my transition and a bunch of different technical things.” After another year filled with close calls, he’s obsessed with making his game more bulletproof in golf’s highest-pressure moments.

“If I look at my year, the only thing I would criticize myself for is the fact that I had these chances to win,” he said. While he took home the Dubai Desert Classic in January, the Zurich Classic in April and the Wells Fargo Championship in May, he had several other near misses, including a shock runner-up finish at the US Open, as well as back-to-back second-place performances. at the Irish Open and Wentworth this fall. His most high-profile mistakes were two shots short at Pinehurst, but McIlroy knows there have been times when his irons have let him down, too.

“For me, it’s just something to make my golf swing more efficient, and if it’s more efficient, then it means it’s not going to break down as much under pressure,” he said. “When I’ve had these chances to win, OK, some may have been because of the shot, but others have been because of my ball striking which let me down as a deciding point. I think just trying to clean all that up so that whenever I’m under that pressure, you know, I can have a hundred percent confidence in my movement and know what’s going to happen.”

It’s no secret that McIlroy wants a major championship more than anything else in the world. Now we know the next thing he’s doing to try to cross the line.

SCHEDULE

In an interview with James Corrigan of Sports TelegraphMcIlroy hinted that he plans to drop his PGA Tour schedule next season. That’s no shocker – until the end of the season, McIlroy had intimated that he was tired and that he had played a lot of events – but it’s still surprising to see which events he plans to miss.

For starters, McIlroy almost never plays Sentry, the Maui Tour’s season opener. And he also doesn’t plan to return to some of the tour starts he made in 2024, including the Cognizant Classic in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., the Valero Texas Open in San Antonio and the RBC Heritage in Hilton Head. The latter two sandwich the Masters, suggesting McIlroy will try a different strategy as he heads to Augusta National next season. (He’s made a habit of playing the week before majors, but that looks set to change.)

Another change: If he plays up to his usual standards, McIlroy also suggested he could skip the first FedEx Cup Playoffs event, where he finished T68 (out of 70) in 2024.

“I probably won’t play the first playoff game in Memphis,” he he said Telegraph. “I mean, I ended up basically dead there this year and only dropped one point down in the playoff standings.”

Many people, including this writer, would understand the beats on an early August trip to Memphis, which would seem like a more logical tour stop in the spring than in the sweltering summer. But it is clear that McIlroy’s theoretical match would come the week of the FedEx St. Louis Championship. Jude, a home game for the Tour’s biggest sponsor.

This is also McIlroy shrugging off a system he helped create. Two years ago he trumpeted Signature Events as a way to strengthen the tour and suggested top pros play them all. In 2025, including playoffs and players, the tour will have 12 signature events – and it looks like McIlroy plans to skip three of them.

Interestingly, there’s at least one event he’s added to his schedule (and we’re not talking about TGL): a December debut of “Coping” with McIlroy and world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler in a crossover match against LIV Golf’s Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka, four individual players exercising their freedom even as their respective leagues remain on hold.

It’s a fun expo and an easy one-day event. But it also seems like an obvious replacement.

3. THE BIG PICTURE

Perhaps no golfer has had a more public or dramatic relationship with the changing landscape of the pro game than McIlroy. When LIV Golf launched in 2022, he took on the unofficial mantle of PGA Tour spokesperson and fought alongside Tiger Woods to keep the Tour’s best players together. He was an outspoken critic of some of those who had left and the way LIV had divided the game.

But when Tour brass reached a preliminary agreement with LIV, that fight suddenly seemed lost. McIlroy Received felt like a sacrificial lamb; this was the end of his time as the unofficial spokesman for the Tour. As golf’s increasingly dull wars have dragged on, McIlroy — who quit the Tour’s Policy Board (and was blocked from returning, though he was named to a transaction subcommittee, and I can hear you bored from here) – has pushed for the parties to find common ground, suggesting that a unified tournament is the only way to avoid irreparable damage to the sport. McIlroy seemed quite friendly with PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan and PIF head Yasir Al-Rumayyan at Dunhill, a reminder of how the landscape has changed and he’s moved with it.

This week in Abu Dhabi McIlroy dismissed rumors that a PGA Tour-Saudi PIF deal had been reached and suggested there is still some way to go. “It’s the first I’ve heard of it,” he said, adding, “I think I would have heard if there was.” After all, any deal needs Justice Department approval, and it won’t happen overnight. But if the DOJ was amenable to a deal, as one reporter suggested…

“It would be a big moment,” McIlroy said.

McIlroy has also trained his eye on Europe, as he tends to this time of year; he hopes to secure his sixth Order of Merit on the European circuit and the Race to Dubai concludes next week.

“I am a European player. I would like to go down as the most successful European of all time. “Obviously the Dubai Race wins will count for that, but so will the major championships and hopefully I’ll have a couple of Ryder Cups ahead of me,” he said.

He also knows that the DP World Tour is trying to find its place in this new world order as well. Like many of his fellow PGA Tour stars in this week’s field – think Tommy Fleetwood, Shane Lowry, Adam Scott – McIlroy parachutes in when he can, but he still misses most of the DP World Tour season, reached the playoffs after the PGA Tour for an autumn residency in Ireland, England and Scotland before finishing the year in the Middle East. In his ideal golf world, the main circuit schedule would include some of the national openings that are hallmarks of the DP World schedule.

“There has to be several tournaments spread throughout the year for the tournament to remain relevant, not just in a four-month window, but a little bit longer than that,” McIlroy said. “Yeah, look, we’ll see what happens. I think I’ve articulated that I think the European Tour is in a good place because there can be a few different options going forward.”

McIlroy feels his home tour has done well to keep his options open. He seems to be positioning himself the same way.

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