‘I’ve learned so much’: Why Justin Rose is so comfortable moving to McLaren Golf

As he stares down his 46th birthday this summer, Justin Rose is the oldest player in the Official World Golf Rankings top 50 — and that experience isn’t lost on him.

In fact, his past experience is part of the reason he feels so comfortable becoming an investor in McLaren Golf, the new venture of the F1 and Supercar juggernaut.

Rose was announced as the company’s first global ambassador on Monday at this week’s Cadillac Championship in Miami. On Tuesday, at a pre-tournament press conference, he was asked about the new partnership, with the brand is set to officially announce its new clubs at an event on Wednesday.

“McLaren Golf has been something that’s been on the back burner for a good number of months,” Rose said Tuesday at his pre-tournament press conference, his first comments since the announcement. “Obviously, to launch a brand out of the ground obviously has been going for a lot longer than a year. It’s something I’ve been involved with from the outset, really helping the engineering team, really testing the very first editions of the club. So yeah, I’ve been kind of working with the project for well over a year, probably.”

Rose himself brought up his past experience with making equipment changes. After spending the first 20 years of his career with TaylorMade Golf, he shocked the golf world when, at the beginning of the 2019 season and as the reigning World No. 1, he left the company to sign with Honma.

Although Rose won early that season at Torrey Pines — like he did this year — the partnership quickly soured and all of the Honma clubs were out of his bag by early 2020. Both parties exited the deal shortly thereafter.

Since then, Rose has been a gear-free agent and one who tinkers frequently from using lead tape on his driver shaft to using split brand set of irons or gaming seven-year-old fairway woods.

On Tuesday, Rose was asked if that freedom was worth giving up given how well he has played of late, winning twice on the PGA Tour since last August and finishing in the top-3 in the last two Masters.

Without being directly asked about it, Rose brought up the 2019 situation with Honma.

“From my point of view, no, I’m actually looking at what can be better. I’m looking to mitigate risk,” Rose said. “Yeah, I’ve done this once before as well in 2019, obviously, and I kind of learned a lot from that process. So I feel a bit better place now to kind of go down this path.

“I think yeah, I think there’s some best practices that we’re kind of, we’ve sort of put into development really that I think are giving me what I feel are a fantastic set of golf clubs. I’m looking at some of the performance data that I’m getting on the range and places like that and outperforming what I have.”

The main differences between 2019 and now are that Rose isn’t signing on with an established brand looking to push into a new market. McLaren is starting their golf business from scratch, and Rose has been along from the start. That’s why he’s also not just an ambassador; he’s an investor in the company.

He added that while he enjoyed his years as a free agent, he didn’t think what he was playing currently was the best thing for him, but he was able to form ideas about what exactly he needed.

“I think when you’re not with an equipment manufacturer, there’s a little bit of temptation just to bounce around anyway, there’s so many good options out there,” Rose said. “But at the same time, I’ve learned so much from being brand agnostic for a while that I kind of have my own preference list now. I feel like I’m in an environment where I can take all my preferences to one place where they can execute on that for me.”

For now, Rose confirmed the company’s initial offering will be two sets of irons, a blade and a cavity-back, which Rose was still contemplating the exact makeup of his set this week in Miami. He acknowledged that there will still be some growing pains as he puts the clubs in competition for the first time.

“Obviously, there’s going to be a refinement process,” he said. “You can test all you want, you got to get the clubs in play, and there’s going to be little mini situations out there, different lies, all sorts of things, just getting comfortable. But in the long-term, no, I don’t see there being an issue at all.”

But this will just be the beginning and he looks forward to building out a complete bag with McLaren.

“I got lots of ideas on every part of the game,” he added. “This is a good place for me to be able to put my ideas down and let the smart engineers go figure it out. But yeah, it’s a fun process to think of it all.”