When Tiger Woods comes to town, well, basically, it’s all about Tiger.
There’s another high-profile guy in the Farmer’s field this week at Torrey Pines and that would be world’s No. 8 Rory McIlroy.
Crucial season for Rory both here and abroad. He’s ranked eighth in the world, falling from the top three, steadily, thanks to an average wedge game and unimpressive putting.
And those are two areas where a player needs to excel, especially a guy like McIlroy who cranks out 340-yard drives like they’re on sale at Wal-Mart.
McIlroy made his season debut at the Tournament Of Champions at Kapalua where he tied for fourth with rounds of 69-69-69-72. He was sitting right there in contention after 54 holes but that bland even-par 72 on Sunday dropped him into that tie for fourth.
McIlroy knows he’s got to get better with the putter.
He knows he needs to do better on the greens in order to get back to an elite level. Last season he was a lowly 97th in strokes gained putting.
“Really my 15-20 feet range is what I need to work on if you look at the stats from last year,” McIlroy said. “It was really my speed. My speed wasn’t very good from that range. I was leaving myself sort of three and four-footers coming back a lot, which is maybe partly a mental thing but also a physical sort of stroke thing and not hitting it out of the center of the putter all the time.”
His wedge game needs to get better as well simply because he hits the ball so far, he leaves himself a lot of wedge shots into the greens. A lot of them ended up outside 15 feet last year and that’s simply not good enough for an elite player.
Rory may not have too many wedges into greens this week.
Torrey Pines is long and the rough will be around inches. Big-boy golf course.
Rory’s going to have to fire on all cylinders to compete this week.
