rightOry McIlroy can be boring, and there’s no question he can give you a riddle, find a rhyme, and give you some great definitions. But as hard as he tried, the one thing he couldn’t do was play like that. “Playing good golf at Augusta National feels like boring golf,” he said a week before the tournament, then promised again that he would try to play that way this year. His attack lasted the entire hole, and he came back with par after missing a putt from 10 feet, but failed when he reached the second tee, where he drove hard The ball hit the woods 340 yards beyond the dogleg hole.
McIlroy’s shot hit the fourth green closer than the second fairway, and he had to put his second shot through a small gap under the branches of dogwood and loblolly pine branches. It teeters on the far left side of the fairway. Then he hit his third ball from behind the green and made three putts. One of the secrets to getting into Augusta National Golf Club is hitting the shot on the par 5, McIlroy, on the first he came to. Just dropped a ball on the hole this week.
If McIlroy needed a reminder of exactly what kind of slow-and-steady golf he should be playing, he only had to look back. He is paired with world number one Scotty Scheffler. He and McIlroy were a great pairing, a regular odd pairing. Xander Schauffele rounded out their trio but barely played.
Scheffler currently ranks in the top five on the PGA Tour in every metric between tee and green. Scheffler ranks only 87th on the driving distance leaderboard, but he leads the PGA Tour in total strokes gained off the tee and is second in strokes gained off the tee. Ranked fifth in the rankings around the ridge. If he can put half as well as everything else, he can win it all between now and next Christmas. He’s so consistent that his caddies are making more money on Tour this year than McIlroy.
On the second hole, as McIlroy bounced around in the pine grass trying to find his route, Scheffler hit his tee shot well away from the large fairway bunker. He hit his second shot to the front of the green and his third shot to 9 feet for birdie. It would be wrong to say Scheffler is boring, exactly, but he served steak and potatoes for his championship dinner here last year. He was asked this week what he would do if he weren’t a golfer, and his response was, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know.” Luckily for him, he didn’t have to. His iron skills are superb and his short game is miraculous.
Some of the shots he hit in this round, like his birdie shot that splashed out of the back bunker on the 12th green, were better than anything seen around here in a long time. . Of course, McIlroy can play like this himself, and that’s what he’s trying to figure out. Because while Scheffler worked his butt off, par, par, par, through all 18 holes without a bogey, McIlroy was careening the course, pitching here, picking up again there. ball. One minute after he birdied the third green, he dropped his tee shot into the front bunker for bogey on the fourth hole.
That’s how McIlroy continued to play, the only way he knew how to play. He hit a 350-yard tee shot on the long, uphill 8th hole, a late putt that set up a second birdie that brought him back to par, and then immediately hit his tee shot to On the 9th hole, the ball luckily bounced off a tree. Back on the fairway, he shot par up and down. The lucky break seemed to improve his mood, and he hit another shot from 10 feet for a hole-in-one on No. 12 and another from 15 feet for a hole-in-one on No. 14. On the 17th, he bogeyed again after the second one flew over the green.
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Meanwhile, Scheffler was ahead of him in the leaderboard. He had three birdies in four holes, 13, 15 and 16, which moved him to 6 under, one shot shy of Bryson DeChambeau’s club lead. . McIlroy had three bogeys and four birdies to stay at one under and five shots back, with the week well behind him. Boredom is boring. Not so with McIlroy.
