Rory McIlroy’s former coach explains his major problem

Rory McIlroy knew just 22 holes into his bid for The Open that his barren major run would tick over a decade. 

Any lingering hopes of an immediate response to last month’s crushing blow at Pinehurst were extinguished with McIlroy’s triple-bogey eight on the fourth hole of his second round at Royal Troon.

“Once I made the eight, I was thinking about where I was going on vacation next week,” he admitted afterwards.

As he always does, McIlroy fought on around the brutal Ayrshire links, but a 78-75 for an 11-over total was a desperately disappointing end to another major season that got away.

Pete Cowen, the esteemed swing coach who was hired by McIlroy for an eight-month stint in 2021, has followed the Northern Irishman’s career closely since the pair first met during his junior days.

The wise veteran from Yorkshire knows McIlroy’s game better than most.

“There’s a lot of pressure on Rory,” Cowen tells bunkered.co.uk, reflecting on his miserable week at Troon. “He did get the worst part of the draw but you did think he’d have been able to manage his game around there. If you hit some wild shots around there, you’re going to get penalised badly.

“The longer the time span is between majors, the harder it gets. It’s like winning again, you’ve got to start again almost, reset. That’s the problem with him. They put so much pressure on him winning the Masters and the Grand Slam.

“That’s almost all he’s thinking about between now and next April which is sad really because the other tournaments deserve the great players to keep playing.”

It will be a long nine months before McIlroy does pitch up to Augusta National and faces the same questions that have dominated the narrative around him for a decade.

Before that though, there is a lot of golf to play – not least the Olympics next week in Paris where he will represent Ireland alongside his good friend Shane Lowry. Yet in the majors at least, McIlroy’s 2023 will still be defined by that agonising US Open defeat to Bryson DeChambeau.

He dropped three shots in his last four holes in North Carolina, missing short putts on 16 and 18 to blow his two-shot advantage down the stretch in a near-miss that some pundits believe will haunt him.

“The one on 16 was almost just a mental aberration really,” Cowen opines. “Normally he doesn’t miss those things and no one could believe it. The 18th was a very very difficult putt. People don’t realise how difficult that was. Anybody could have done that unfortunately. But difficult to watch when you see something like that.

“To be fair he played the best golf on that Sunday, but the best golf doesn’t always win.”

Like McIlroy, Cowen has seen the criticism aimed at caddie Harry Diamond for playing an apparent role in the Pinehurst collapse  – and he’s not having any of it.

“Harry is a great lad and a good caddie,” Cowen says. “He’s not hitting the shots. The responsibility comes down to the player all the time. It has to be, and the player has to take responsibility. That’s what it is really.”

The real problem, Cowen insists, is that McIlroy can’t switch off from the outside noise.

“Everybody watches him hitting balls on the range and I said ‘well, that’s alright, all your focus is there on the range,'” he explains.

“You’ve got no time between shots and then when you get on the course the blinkers start opening up. You’ve got five or ten minutes between each shot and that’s when the brain starts thinking of other things. It’s not easy to switch back on and hit the shot.”

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Cowen knows McIlroy’s familiar technical flaw can be exposed under the upmost pressure, but he remains adamant that it’s a mental block that is stifling him most in the majors.

“He’s got the same fault all the time,” he says. “The good thing about it is it’s the same fault, but that’s also the bad thing about it. He knows exactly what he does. He drops (the club) under a bit and starts flipping it a bit and doesn’t get under any pressure on it so struggles with the ball flight. But he knows he’s had the same problem for a long time. He does address it and sometimes when he’s addressed it he plays great and wins.

“These guys are so good so most of it is down to the mental side of the game. Expectations come into it. Course setup comes into it for certain players because when the course is set up for certain players, it doesn’t suit other players.

“Everybody says Augusta suits him because he hits a draw but Nicklaus won six times there and he’s a fader.”

The same old question persists. Will McIlroy eventually get over the line in one of the four that matter most?

“If I had to put money on it, I’d say yes, but golf’s a funny game,” Cowen says. “You get a good break and all of a sudden you could win two or three in a row like Xander, but it gets harder. He wins big tournaments in any case.

‘It’s a smaller stage. As the stage gets higher, the more difficult and the more stage fright you get. You’ve got to look at it and say when the stage gets that high, like on a major because that’s the highest stage he can hit, sometimes you get a bit of stage fright. Everybody does.

“Some players can put the blinkers on all the way round for five hours but a lot of people can’t put the blinkers on. You’ve got to win again, you’ve got to restart.”

Ben Parsons joined bunkered as a Content Producer in 2023 and is the man to come to for all of the latest news, across both the professional and amateur games. Formerly of The Mirror and Press Association, he is a member at Halifax Golf Club and is a long-suffering fan of both Manchester United and the Wales rugby team.