Rory Begins Practicing For PGA During The Open

Martyn Herman with Rory McIlroy's post round assertion that he began hitting drivers after a bad start, all to start preparing for the next major.

"I decided that I was going to hit driver every hole that I could, because that's going to be a big factor the next few weeks, and I actually drove the ball pretty well, and ended up playing the last 11 holes even par.

"That was encouraging, but obviously I'm disappointed to be going home for the weekend. It's the first time I've missed a cut at the Open."

Jonathan McEvoy assesses the state of Rory's game and life, wondering what Rory will "ponder in the barren hours of an unexpectedly free weekend." Caroline is all but blamed, Andy Murray cited.

...will he talk through with his tennis star girlfriend Caroline Wozniacki? This brings us — in the absence of Freud — to an instructive comparison between two of the most exciting talents in UK sport: Andy Murray, 26, and the troubled McIlroy, 24.

Murray has in place a lifestyle geared to top-level sport: a steady girlfriend, Kim Sears, who travels with him some of the time and knows how to lend her support unobtrusively, settled management in Simon Fuller’s XIX Entertainment and a coach in Ivan Lendl who is as grizzled a relic of the cold, old East as the Berlin Wall.

For McIlory, the story is strikingly different. It has been estimated that he attends 70 per cent of Wozniacki’s tournaments. He was at the Italian Open for four or five days; he hot-footed to the Eastbourne Championships from the US Golf Open to see her and then on to Wimbledon.