FLOURTOWN, Pa. — Rory McIlroy blasted driver all over a Golden Age course on Thursday at the 2025 Truist Championship. For McIlroy and much of the Signature Event field, it was a driver-wedge fest at the Wissahickon Course at the A.W. Tillinghast-designed Philadelphia Cricket Club in Round 1.
As my colleague James Colgan wrote earlier this week, a perplexing question surrounded pro golf’s return to the Philadelphia area: Will what makes these old-school masterpieces special matter when facing today’s modern technology?
Philly Cricket Club is the type of course that the best players in the world should play. It’s a world away from the cookie-cutter courses the PGA Tour typically plays. But at just a shade over 7,100 yards, Philly Cricket Club, molded in 1922, is defenseless without firm and fast conditions. Even then, it doesn’t have a lot of teeth for the game’s best players armed with today’s equipment.
On Friday, with the wind blowing and the rain coming down, the PGA Tour’s best saw a different side of Philly Cricket Club. With the ball not flying nearly as far, McIlroy, a vocal proponent of rolling back the golf ball, better understood how Tillinghast’s creation was meant to be attacked.
“Absolutely. It’s a little more strategic,” McIlroy said after shooting a second-round three-under 67. “Even today, heavier air, rain, a bit of wind. I draw back on a few holes and then I hit driver on a couple. I think there’s a lot of debate about it, but if the golf ball just went a little shorter, this course would be awesome. Not that it isn’t awesome anyway, but right now, for the distances we hit it, it’s probably 500 or 600 yards too short.
“It would be amazing to be able to play courses like this the way the architect wanted you to play them.”
On Thursday, McIlroy hit his drive at the short par-4 second 373 yards on the way to making an easy birdie. On Friday, with the wind blowing in a different direction and the ball throttled back, McIlroy’s drive went 314. A sloppy second shot found the bunker, and he made bogey.
The USGA and R&A’s rollback — coming in 2028 — calls for the longest hitters on Tour to lose 13-15 yards in driving distance, with average pros losing 9-11 yards. McIlroy, who would be in the first category, has been a proponent of the rollback plan for the long-term sustainability of the game. It would also help return some teeth to golf’s cathedrals.
Rolling back the ball would theoretically make pros play places like Philly Cricket as intended and not allow them to hammer driver past the course’s defenses.
Justin Thomas, who also shot three under on Friday and is tied with McIlroy at 7 under, pointed to the par-4 10th as a hole where the conditions altered the strategy.
“It’s just the ball didn’t go anywhere when it’s like this,” Thomas said. “A hole like 10 is a good example. We’re flipping sand wedges, gap wedges in yesterday, and I hit a drive as good as I could and hit a pretty good 6-iron in today.
