In 13 career appearances at Big Jack’s Memorial Tournament, Rory McIlroy has five top-10 finishes and another four top-20s. It’s a record, on one of the game’s splashiest stages, that most players would embrace, but McIlroy is, of course, not most players. He’s a 30-time PGA Tour winner with six major titles and the career Grand Slam. He has arrived at a place where he’s not looking to win just any tournaments but the right kind of tournaments. Majors. National opens. Events hosted by or affiliated with legends.
“I would say here and Tiger’s event at Riviera, they’re the two that I would love to win,” McIlroy said Wednesday.
Tiger’s event is the Genesis Invitational in Los Angeles, where McIlroy has gone winless in 10 attempts. “Here” is this week’s event, the Memorial, at Muirfield Village in Ohio, where McIlroy is 0-for-13. “I always thought it would be cool to win here and take that little walk up the hill off the 18th green and shake Jack’s hand,” McIlroy said.
McIlroy and Nicklaus go back nearly two decades: mentee and mentor, fellow GOATs and South Floridians, occasional lunchmates at the Bear’s Club. During one of those bread-breakings a couple of years back, McIlroy gave Nicklaus a shot-by-shot description of how he planned to attack Augusta National at that year’s Masters. “I wouldn’t change a thing,” Nicklaus told him. “I think it’s exactly the way you should play it.” Before this year’s Masters, Nicklaus spotted McIlroy during a range session and offered him more counsel. “I put my hands on his shoulders,” Nicklaus said, “and I said to him, ‘No effing double bogeys.’”
McIlroy did card a couple of doubles, but Nicklaus’s message still was received: Don’t be a dummy out there. Heeding that strategy led McIlroy to his second straight green jacket.
Which brings us back to Muirfield Village. What wisdom has Nicklaus imparted to McIlroy about how to manage Nicklaus’s masterwork?
“He hasn’t asked me,” Nicklaus said Tuesday.
Reporters did, though — specifically, whether Nicklaus had any theories about why McIlroy had not yet triumphed at Muirfield. Nicklaus provided a thoughtful answer.
“I think that this golf course is a golf course that really requires patience,” he said. “I didn’t design it for big hitters, didn’t design it for short hitters, didn’t design it for the middle. I tried to design it so we could take care of everybody and try to give a fair shake to every kind of player. And when you get that, you can’t just stand up and just whack away at it on every hole.”
That grip-it-and-rip-it approach is how a younger Nicklaus used to try and slay his own design (unsuccessfully), and it’s not hard to imagine a younger, bolder McIlroy coming into MVGC with the same mentality. In time, though, McIlroy, like Nicklaus, has learned that driver — at least with the distance he smashes his tee shots — is no good at Muirfield. That’s because the fairways pinch his landing zones.
“It’s frustrated me in a way that I feel like my biggest weapon is in some way neutralized here,” McIlroy said. “And then I have to play the golf course like most of the other guys in the field.”
That is, strategically — identifying the best leaves for the most optimal angles into the greens and then controlling the flight and spin of those approaches.
The greens are no pushover, either, Nicklaus said, particularly for players who like to zip back their irons (see: most modern Tour pros). “Take 3, 6, 9, 10, 14, 15, 17, and 18,” Nicklaus said. “If you spin the ball off of those greens, what happens? Not a good result.”
The alternative? Vary your trajectories, Nicklaus said. That’s what he learned to do, both at Muirfield and another ballpark with which he became synonymous, Augusta National. ”I think Augusta’s a trajectory golf course also,” Nicklaus said.
McIlroy is a traj maestro. Really, he can do just about anything he wants with a golf ball. At Muirfield, it’s just a matter of committing to the shots that the course demands. If McIlroy can follow that formula, a warm handshake from his Bear’s Club pal might be in his very near future.
“I would love to see Rory play well here,” Nicklaus said.
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