McIlroy missed his second cut in the last two years with a second-round 78 at the RBC Canadian Open. It's not how he wants to enter the U.S. Open.
“You have this event in your life that you’ve worked towards and it happens,” McIlroy said Wednesday. “Sometimes, it’s hard to find the motivation to get back on the horse and go again.”McIlroy shot a second-round 78 at TPC Toronto to finish at 9-over and miss the cut for the first time since last year’s British Open.
It’s the second time the Northern Irishman hasn’t played a weekend since the 2023 Masters., where McIlroy finished T47, the 36-year-old surprisingly spoke to the media after his second round and was trying to find a silver lining in his lackluster performance. “Look, even though the last two days didn’t go the way I wanted them to, there’s still things that I can take from it, and there’s still things that I can learn,” he said. “I’m going to have to do a lot of practice and a lot of work over the weekend at home and try to at least have a better idea of where my game is going into next week.” Sitting in 149th-place after 36 holes in Canada, only four players were below McIlroy on the leaderboard: Matthieu Pavon, Mark Hoffman, Wes Heffernan and David Hearn. Hearn is No. 236 in the world rankings, while Hoffman and Heffernan aren’t ranked. McIlroy’s hopes of making a run this week were essentially dashed with a quadruple bogey on the par-4 fifth, hitting his second and fourth shots out of bounds. “I think, once I made that big number on the front nine, I was always behind the eight ball a little bit,” McIlroy said. “After nine holes, I sort of resigned myself to the fact that I’d be flying home to Florida tonight.” The world No. 2 was playing a new, shorter TaylorMade Qi35 driver this week after his old one was ruled. And similar to the PGA, McIlroy struggled off the tee at TPC Toronto, hitting just 13 of 28 fairways, which ranked T142 in the field. “I went back to a 44-inch driver this week to try to get something that was a little more in control and could try to get something a bit more in play,” the 29-time Tour winner said. “But if I’m going to miss fairways, I’d rather have the ball speed and miss the fairway than not. “I was saying to going down the last, this is the second time this year I’ve tried the new version, and it hasn’t quite worked out for me. So I’d say I’ll be testing quite a few drivers over the weekend.” Now, McIlroy shifts his attention to next week’s U.S. Open at Oakmont, and this isn’t how he envisioned entering the year’s third major. “It concerns me,” the five-time major champion said. “You don’t want to shoot high scores like the one I did today. Still, I felt like I came here obviously with a new driver, thinking that that sort of was going to be good and solve some of the problems off the tee, but it didn’t. “Obviously, going to Oakmont next week, what you need to do more than anything else there is hit fairways. Still sort of searching for the sort of missing piece off the tee. Obviously, for me, when I get that part of the game clicking, then everything falls into place for me. Right now, that isn’t. Yeah, that’s a concern going into next week.”Max Schreiber is a contributor to the Breaking and Trending News team at Sports Illustrated, covering golf. Before joining SI in October 2024, the Mahwah, N.J., native, worked as an associate editor for the Golf Channel and wrote for RyderCup.com and FanSided. He is a multiplatform producer for Newsday and has a bachelor's in communications and journalism from Quinnipiac University. In his free time, you can find him doing anything regarding the Yankees, Giants, Knicks and Islanders.
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