Your swing or your equipment? Pros reveal which they change when they have problems

For a player who had won four majors, three FedEx Cups and over $80 million in prize money on the PGA Tour, Rory McIlroy has gone through a lot of putters. He has used a variety of blade putters and mallet putters since turning pro in 2007, but seemed to have an epiphany during the 2021 Northern Trust.

“I said to Harry (Diamond, his caddie) after the first round, ‘I’m thinking about going back to the Spider,’ and then I proceeded to gain four strokes on the greens over the next two days with it,” McIlroy said. “But I think the thing with the blade is, the good days are really good, but the bad days are pretty bad, as well.”

Still, he used a Scotty Cameron blade putter at the WGC-Dell Match Play Championship in March and a Scotty Cameron Phantom X 5.5 at the BMW Championship in August, showing that he is still open to changing putters.

When Golfweek asked McIlroy at the Tour Championship how he knows when it’s time to change clubs instead of focusing on his swing or putting stroke, he described a situation that occurred this season.  

“I think when you play as much golf as we do, your subconscious knows what shots you can hit and what shots you can’t,” he said. “I was over my second shot at Oak Hill on 18 on Sunday, and I didn’t have a chance to win the golf tournament but I was in the top 10. I mean, whether I made birdie or not on that hole, it wasn’t really going to make a difference. The pin was on left side of the green, and I just sensed myself aiming further and further right as I got over the ball. So I just couldn’t trust that I could hit the shot that I wanted to hit.”

According to ShotLink, the shot was a 164-yard shot from the left side of the fairway to a hole on the left side of the green. McIlroy’s ball finished 39 feet to the right of the hole.

“When I got in after that, I was like, ‘I need to do something here because I’m not able to hit … if I can’t hit a shot under basically zero pressure to a left pin, how am I expected to do it when [there is pressure]?’ So that was really when it’s, like, this is purely technique. I need to go and work on some stuff. I think the little bit of work that I did around, like, after PGA before that Memorial, Canada, U.S. Open, Travelers stretch, like, that really helped me go on to play some really [good golf] after that. Even though I played okay at Oak Hill, I wasn’t terribly comfortable, but I went on a really consistent run after then, and just that little bit of self-reflection and being like, yeah, that wasn’t a good feeling and knowing that, okay, I need to work on my technique a little bit so that I can trust what I’m doing a bit more.”

Recreational golfers feel doubt before hitting shots all the time, but McIlroy revealed that pros feel it, too.

“I think it always comes back to that,” McIlroy said. “You can make some equipment changes to try to freshen it up or try to just get a different look, but for the most part, it’s the person at the end of the club swinging it that’s usually the problem.”