When asked for his road Ryder Cup advice to newcomers, Rory McIlroy talked about balance. Away from home, things can get chippy. The inclination, then, is to get chippy back.
But too much chippy can cause problems, he said.
Same goes for not enough.
“I feel at times in the Ryder Cup, I have engaged too much with that, too much with the crowd,” McIlroy said Thursday, a day ahead of this year’s Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black. “But then there’s times where I haven’t engaged enough. So it’s really just trying to find the balance of using that energy from the crowd to fuel your performance.
“I felt like at Hazeltine [at the 2016 Ryder Cup], I probably engaged too much at times, and then Whistling Straits [at the Ryder Cup in 2021], I didn’t engage enough and felt pretty flat because of it. It’s just trying to find that balance.
“I can’t tell anyone on the team what that balance is. They really have to find it themselves. But that’s the challenge of playing away, right. You’re not just trying to perform to your best level, but someone in the American team holes a putt, and then you have to try to follow them in. But you know, you’ve got the crowd going crazy and you’re waiting for them to quiet. There’s a lot of little things like that that I guess takes you out of your normal routine that you just have to deal with, and that’s part of the challenge of this week.”
With that setup, we go to Bethpage’s 11th hole on Friday afternoon. McIlroy and European partner Shane Lowry were playing Americans Sam Burns and Patrick Cantlay in a four-ball match. Things were back and forth. On 11, Lowry rolled in a 3-footer for birdie, after a wonderful short iron in from 114 yards out, and Lowry and McIlroy went 2-up in the match. They celebrated. At one point, Lowry pointed to a fan greenside; broadcasters believed the motion was toward a fan holding an Ireland flag. Lowry and McIlroy walked off the green.
Then McIlroy pointed with just one finger to his left. Sky Sports captured it. A fan tweeted out a video of it.
You can decide whether McIlroy has found the right balance. The video is below.
