Rory Cites "Speed Training" For Recent Struggles: "I'm sort of fighting to get back out of that. That's what I'm frustrated with."

The sight of Pete Cowen watching Rory McIlroy no doubt generated plenty of Players range buzz.

But after McIlroy posted 79-75, the admission of struggles tied to his speed pursuit last fall should offer a cautionary tale. After round two at The Players:

Q. What are you most frustrated with?

RORY McILROY: Probably the swing issues and where it all stems from, probably like October last year, doing a little bit of speed training, started getting sucked into that stuff, swing got flat, long, and too rotational. Obviously I added some speed and am hitting the ball longer, but what that did to my swing as a whole probably wasn't a good thing, so I'm sort of fighting to get back out of that. That's what I'm frustrated with.

I felt like I made some good strides. I played well at TOUR Championship, played well at the U.S. Open. I sort of look back at Winged Foot and I look at my swing there, and I would be pretty happy with that again, and then after Winged Foot I had a few weeks before we went to the West Coast and I started to try to hit the ball a bit harder, hit a lot of drivers, get a bit more speed, and I felt like that was sort of the infancy of where these swing problems have come from. So it's just a matter of trying to get back out of it.

Hey, leave the West Coast out of this. We didn’t make you go all in on launch angle golf!

Sorry, go on…

Q. Not to play amateur psychologist, but you're obviously one of the longest players on the PGA TOUR. Why do you think you went down that route?

RORY McILROY: I think a lot of people did. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't anything to do with what Bryson did at the U.S. Open. I think a lot of people saw that and were like, whoa, if this is the way they're going to set golf courses up in the future, it helps. It really helps.

The one thing that people don't appreciate is how good Bryson is out of the rough. Not only because of how upright he is but because his short irons are longer than standard, so he can get a little more speed through the rough than us, than other guys. And I thought being able to get some more speed is a good thing, and I maybe just -- to the detriment a little bit of my swing, I got there, but I just need to maybe rein it back in a little bit.

Sounds like a good plan.

Slowing Down Golf Courses Is Not A Distance Debate Solution

Several sent along Dr. Chamblee’s latest distance elixir, his 43rd pivot on a topic Golf Channel’s lead analyst has adopted to the detriment of his otherwise compelling analysis work. And it hasn’t even brought a certain Massachusetts advertiser back into the fold.

I won’t waste much time highlighting his view that you slow down home runs by raising the infield grass, but that is the case being made to deal with today’s absurd carry distances. But remember, these are back to back sentences as they appeared on GolfChannel.com:

But there is also a graph which shows, quite clearly, players’ increased visits to the fitness van plots the line of the increased yardage gained over the last 40 years. I’d argue that one could also make a graph where the increased driving distance, to some extent, corresponds to the decreased fairway heights, which over the last 30 years have come down from being cut at 3/4 of an inch, to now being cut at 3/16 of an inch.

Yes, you read correctly: he went from players going to fitness vans to get their distance gains “to some extent” corresponding with lowering mowing heights.

Actually, no extent.

There was also a whopper of a misrepresentation that might have been fact-checked if they hadn’t fired most of the editors. Chamblee’s claim of most fairways getting cut at 3/16th of an inch was refuted by the USGA’s Championship Agronomist on Twitter:

Vast, vast majority of courses are not routinely cutting fairways below 1/4 inch, not even close. Not even at the Tour courses.

— Darin Bevard (@DarinBevard) January 6, 2021

This was all really a roundabout way to point out that last weekend’s Sentry Tournament Of Some Champions was hard to watch. The views and whale shots were as spectacular as ever, but Kapalua’s Plantation course was a sponge.

A Coore-Crenshaw design to played on the ground with the ball running had taken on a lot of rain leading up to the tournament, hasn’t played faster after the renovation designed to help it do so, and therefore called on little creativity or shotmaking. It played longer, yes, but it was also tough to find remotely compelling.

Every course plays better firmer and faster. Harvesting rough, slowing down fairways and attempting to mute technology-fueled gains via agronomy is not only a woeful idea, it goes against the very soul of a game built on firm ground.

Does anyone want to sacrifice a core principle of golf to avoid taking 10% of carry away from 1000 golf pros? Trying to watch lush and lifeless Kapalua should give you the answer.