Rory McIlroy hits just three fairways in wild 65

OLYMPIA FIELDS, Ill. – When it comes to the cadence of a PGA TOUR season, it’s not always how you start, but how you finish. Exhibit A is Rory McIlroy, the only three-time FedExCup champion, who outdid himself in that regard at the BMW Championship on Thursday.

After making seven pars to open the tournament, he birdied five of his last 11 holes for a 65. After hitting just three fairways off the tee, he was so good at getting the ball in the hole – three-for-three in scrambling and a chip-in birdie on 17 – that it didn’t matter.

“I mean, only hitting three fairways today and coming up with 65 is a bit of a bonus,” said McIlroy, who is tied at the top of the leaderboard with Brian Harman and projected to move from FedExCup No. 3 to No. 1. “But with the golf course being so soft, it's almost an advantage to be playing out of the rough going into some of these greens because you know the ball is not going to spin.

“I'm not saying I was trying to aim for the rough,” he continued, “but I was, I think, a lot of the tee shots I was just being super aggressive because I knew in the back of my mind I wasn't really being penalized for it. The golf course is certainly not playing the way it played (for the BMW) in 2020. That was not my approach a few years ago here.”

Thursday’s highlight was McIlroy’s birdie on 17 after he’d missed way left off the tee. From heavy rough, with a 7-iron, he slashed at the ball and watched it narrowly miss the tree trunk and branches, skitter through a bunker and roll over the green. From there he chipped in, smiling broadly at his most improbable birdie since the Genesis Scottish Open.

It was in Scotland, of course, that he birdied his last two holes in heavy wind last month for his second win this season and 24th overall on TOUR.

“The window was OK,” McIlroy said of his shoot-the-gap second shot at Olympia Fields on Thursday. “It was more there was a couple of branches above the window I was looking at, and I was like, if it hits those, it's just going to drop down sort of near that front left bunker and I'll have a decent angle down the green and mostly have at least a 10-footer or less to save par.

“It was a bit of a hit and a hope,” he added. “…It was either sort of chip it out or try to take it on, and it's only Thursday, I thought, ‘What the heck, I'll take it on and see what happens.’”

And that wasn’t even his best shot – at least according to McIlroy. He said he was more impressed with his 70-foot pitch from gnarly rough behind the third green, his ball coming to rest just over 2 feet from the pin for a kick-in par. In the end, he was so happy with his final score that he shrugged off the fact that he was 50th out of 50 players in driving accuracy.

“I don't lose a lot of confidence with the driver,” he said. “One bad day is not going to make me lose any sleep.”

He was so unconcerned, he added, that he wouldn’t even be going to the range for a late-afternoon session in order to get things sorted out for Round 2.

“No, I've got seven more rounds in these Playoffs,” McIlroy said. “I'll just conserve my energy.”

Spoken like a guy who has done this a time or two.