The mask slipped, time and time again. When it did, Rory McIlroy’s facial expression conveyed frustration, or bemusement, or something in between. A wry smile on occasion. This wasn’t how it was meant to be in the first round of The Players at TPC Sawgrass, where an opening round 76, four over par, left the world number three thrown into a fight for survival, never mind entertaining any realistic thoughts of actually winning.
As Chad Ramey, a player ranked 225th in the world, stepped out of the shadows and into the spotlight with a superbly crafted bogey-free opening round of eight-under-par 64 to claim the clubhouse lead, a shot clear of Collin Morikawa, McIlroy was left to come to terms with an underperformance that had his driver as the main culprit in an error-strewn start to the PGA Tour’s flagship tournament.
The numbers didn’t make for pretty reading. His scrawled signature on to the scorecard for a 76 came in a round where he found only six of 14 fairways (playing far too often from the rough on his second shots), where he found only 10 of 18 greens-in-regulation, was zero for three in sand saves and took 31 putts.
The TaylorMade driver he put into his bag at the Genesis Invitational at Riviera last month had performed well enough in securing a runner-up spot in last week’s Arnold Palmer Invitational. But it proved to be a disobedient part of his club armoury for the test around the Pete Dye-designed course where McIlroy had triumphed in 2019.
“I went to that new driver in Riviera and it’s just not [right]. I wish I could use my driver from last year but I can’t. You use a driver for so long and it starts to get a little too [much of a trampoline effect]. Basically, it just wouldn’t pass the test.
“These driver heads are so finicky, it’s hard to get one exactly the same. I’m obviously trying my best to get something that’s as close to what I had last year. I just struggled off the tee the last couple of weeks,” explained McIlroy of his driver issues, adding: “This one is as close as it’s been. Yeah, there’s obviously a part of it that’s the user, as well. It’s quite a lot of user error in there, as well.”
In short, Sawgrass is not a place to be playing from the rough: “I feel like this is as penal as I’ve seen it out of the rough for a long time. I think you’d have to go back to when the tournament was played in May, when we were in Bermuda rough, for it to be as penal as that. Yeah, you don’t hit it on the fairway here, you’re going to struggle.”
His round started badly, with a double-bogey on the 10th, his opening hole, and it ended badly, with a bogey on the par-five ninth. It pretty much summed up his woes, although McIlroy himself identified a three-putt on the par-five 16th, where he’d found the green in two, as a primary cause in stopping him getting any momentum.
McIlroy was part of a marquee group featuring the world’s top three players, with Jon Rahm signing for a 71 and Scottie Scheffler for a 68.
All were upstaged by Ramey, a player with one tour win – last year’s Corales Puntacana – in a professional career that has been spent mainly on the Korn Ferry circuit. However, Ramey, playing in the Players for the first time, played brilliantly in a bogey-free round that yielded eight birdies.
“I might have made it look [easy] but it wasn’t easy at all,” said the 30-year-old American. “It was fun, my first time to shoot a score on such an iconic course like this. You can’t ask for any more. Nerves? There’s always nerves, but it’s just they don’t mean anything. It kind of means you care. You’ve got to deal with them. That’s kind of why we play the game, it’s why we’re here is to have those nerves. Just kind of push past them, push them aside, and just do what you’ve got to do.”
Ramey set the clubhouse target on a day where Haydn Buckley became just the 11th player to record a hole-in-one on the 17th hole – the Island Green – in the tournament’s history.
“I knew if I could hit somewhere around a 130-yard shot, which I work on a lot . ... you don’t want to overdo it. I think one guy I played with before kind of overdid it and came up short, and I just thought, if we can hit one pretty straight, hope for it to land somewhere around the hill, and it just looked perfect the whole way. I had a little feeling something like that might happen this week. I don’t know, I’ve been hitting it well, but it’s always nice to see it happen on that hole,” said Buckley.
