Remember when Rory McIlroy switched to cavity-back irons?
Well, he’s switched back to blades.
“That experiment’s over,” McIlroy said Tuesday ahead of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. “Back to the trusty irons that I’ve played basically my whole career.”
McIlroy first put the TaylorMade P7CB irons, 5-9, in the bag for the final 36 holes of the Australian Open last December. He continued to use the cavity-backs for both DP World Tour starts in Dubai last month.
But after finishes of T-14, T-3 and most recently T-33 at the Dubai Desert Classic, McIlroy swapped back in his Rors Proto blades.
“I felt like the cavity-backs just had a little bit of a right bias in them,” McIlroy explained. “So, whatever way the weight of the head was, or whether it was the blade length, 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. I felt like, in a way, it’s not a bad thing because I don’t like seeing the ball go left, so 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.
“Just didn’t feel as familiar as I wanted it to.”
McIlroy is the defending champion this week at Pebble Beach as his makes his PGA Tour season debut.