Rory McIlroy’s bag looks a lot more like Rory McIlroy’s bag again.
After experimenting with a set of TaylorMade P7CB cavity back irons for the past two months and raving about them, McIlroy has made a somewhat shocking decision to revert back to his RORS PROTO blades this week for his PGA Tour season debut at Pebble Beach.
“That experiment’s over, back to the trusty irons that I’ve played basically my whole career,” McIlroy said.
McIlroy first made the switch in early December by inserting P7CB long irons at the Australian Open. He loved the turf interaction and forgiveness so much that he went and inserted the full set, to the 9-iron, of P7CBs by the weekend. He kept them in the bag through his January TGL appearances and first two official starts of the season in Dubai on the DP World Tour.
“If there’s help to be had, I’ll definitely take it,” McIlroy said at the Dubai Invitational. “And even in Dubai at the end of last year, I hit a couple of 5-irons that I mis-struck slightly, and instead of it maybe coming up five or seven yards short, it was coming up more like 10 to 15 yards short.”
But when he arrived at Pebble Beach this week for his PGA Tour season debut, his RORS PROTOs that he has used almost exclusively since signing with TaylorMade were back in the bag.
For McIlroy, the decision didn’t have anything to do with the launch conditions of forgiveness of the cavity backs, but rather the dispersion pattern. McIlroy said he started to notice a right bias.
“So whatever way the weight of the head was or whether it was the blade length,” McIlroy, this week’s defending champion, said, “I’d make swings that I feel like I’d make with my blades that would be a very neutral ball flight and then with the cavity backs they would just like start to tail off to the right.”
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That’s not inherently a bad thing for McIlroy, who doesn’t like to see the ball go left. While the P7CB is a compact cavity-back iron designed to give a blade player like McIlroy a more forgiving option without compromising on looks or performance, it does have a slightly longer blade length than the RORS PROTO.
While it may not be the sole cause of McIlroy’s perceived right bias, a longer blade length will slow the closure rate through impact, making it easier to leave the club face slightly open.
McIlroy initially liked the right bias in practice, but once he started playing more in competition, he realized it felt unnatural to him.
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“It made me feel like I could fully release like my iron shots, which is great in theory and great in practice, but then once you get on the course with a card in your hand, for so many years I’m used to feeling that like held-off position through impact and then to go from that to trying to release it, it just was a different feel, especially under pressure or in the heat of competition,” he said. “Just didn’t feel as familiar as I wanted it to.”
Does this truly mean the end of McIlroy experimenting with cavity backs? Probably not.
In fact, this was probably a very useful experiment for McIlroy and TaylorMade. Both parties know McIlroy wants the additional forgiveness, but now they know that he needs a head that doesn’t require him to change his swing tendencies, even if he thought he might like it.
Taking a little right bias out of the P7CB shouldn’t be too difficult, whether it’s shortening the blade length or moving some weight a little closer to the hosel. Maybe that will be the goal of TaylorMade’s next cavity-back iron now that they know McIlroy is open to change.
If McIlroy’s experimenting shows us anything, it’s that his blades still might find their way out of the bag in due time.
The author welcomes your comments at Jack.Hirsh@golf.com.
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