THE MEMORIAL TOURNAMENT PRESENTED BY NATIONWIDE

July 17, 2020

Rory McIlroy

Muirfield Village

Quick Quotes

Q. Rory, is this round kind of a microcosm of your golf since you started back up?

RORY McILROY: A little bit. I don't know what it was. It was a few birdies and an eagle thrown in there and a few mistakes. Yeah, sort of. There's some good in there, obviously, some mediocre, and there was some pretty poor shots. But I battled back well. I was 3-over through 2, got off to a terrible start, but battled back and hung in there and ended up shooting a reasonable score. It would have been nice to finish a couple better if I had have taken advantage of that par-5 at the end, and the three-putt on 9 sort of leaves a bit of a bitter taste, but I came back well, and that's all you can ask for.

Q. When you made that double on 11, what was your mindset when you stepped on the 12th tee there?

RORY McILROY: Yeah, my goal was to try to get back to even par for the day. I didn't really put a time frame on it when I wanted to get back to even par, but if I got back to even par for the day, and I did that, and I went a little bit beyond that. But yeah, that's all I was thinking of. There's plenty of holes left. Obviously there's three par-5s, a few chances. If you hit it in the fairway you're going to have a few wedges because the course is firming up a bit. I knew I had chances out there, I just needed to stay patient.

Q. I heard you talking over there about wedge play, and there was a stat floating around on Twitter today that your 5-wood into 5 was closer than any wedge shot that you had. Can you just describe the difficulty that --

RORY McILROY: Yeah, I mean, I think I could bounce that back and say I'm No. 1 player on TOUR from 125 to 150 this year, so if you actually dig into the stats I'm actually hitting those shots pretty well. But it was just today, I just struggled a little bit and felt like I was in between yardages and trying to hit a lot of three-quarter shots and just not sure with my decels on a couple. I actually hit a couple fat, which I've had Harry look at my ball position, might have crept a little too far forward. But yeah, obviously the 5-wood on 5 is going to be the star of the show. People are going to start to make comparisons. But if you actually look at my iron play from between 100 and 150 this year, I'm ranked -- I'm top from 125 to 150 but I'm sort of in the top 20 of all those stats categories. So I'm not doing too badly. But today was just one of those days where I didn't hit good enough wedges.

Q. Was it a depth perception issue?

RORY McILROY: Sometimes. Sometimes you get over these shots and because there's nothing at the back of greens and you've got a 90-yard shot and you look up and you see the pin and it doesn't look 90, it's just one of those things where it's like, this sort of looks like it's shorter and then sometimes you're in two minds. Again, it's just a -- it's all these things that we have to adjust to out here. It's just not normally how we play or how we're thinking, and it's just different. It's going to be that way, and you have to deal with it, but yeah, you've just got to try and learn as you go along.

Q. Tiger said he wasn't moving as well as he would have liked, couldn't turn and couldn't clear. What was your vantage point from inside the ropes?

RORY McILROY: He looked pretty good starting off. He looked pretty good starting off, and then yeah, you could sort of tell when we made the turn, he hit a couple fairway wood shots off the tee that he sort of quit on. But yeah, I mean, it looked a little bit that way, that he wasn't quite moving as well. But he battled really well. He made those two birdies coming in and a good save on 9. Hopefully that's enough for him to be around for the weekend.

Q. When he's physically not himself like that, does he say anything? Is there any acknowledgment to what's going on physically?

RORY McILROY: No, not really. I mean, you can sort of tell. You can tell, he might make a bit of a grimace after a shot or something. But no, he wouldn't just flat-out say or make excuses. He's never been one to make excuses, right, so he's never going to do that.