Rory McIlroy made a huge comeback on Friday at the Arnold Palmer Invitational.
He turned things around with his driver and cut eight shots off the 75 he opened with on Thursday.
His five-under par 67 carried good news and bad news.
Good news is he’ll make the 36-hole cut. Bad news is he’ll go into the weekend 11 shots behind leader Jason Day.
Day got to 13-under, adding a 65 to his first round 66.
“Horrific,” is how McIlroy described his driving on St. Patrick’s Day. His round started out when he hooked his opening drive out-of-bounds, onto the practice range. He had a bad case of the hooks all day and it was the practice range where he retreated to late Thursday.
“I mean, I needed to do something,” McIlroy said. “I came out to the range last night and worked on a few things, figured something out.” The one thing McIlroy knew is that his driver face was closed at impact, causing a wild day off the tees. “It was a bit of a shock to me,” he recalled.
He used his trackman and figured that the ball was a bit too far up in his stance.
On Friday, his driver behaved and his putter came to life. It was a total turnaround with six birdies and just a single bogey and that came at the par three seventh when he missed the green right and failed to get up-and-down for par.
“The main objective today was just to make it to the weekend,” McIlroy said.
His chances of winning are slim to none but 36 more holes will give him a chance to work on getting things back in order.
