Jonathan Wall / Golf
CHARLOTTE, North Carolina – Rory McIlroy knows what you’re thinking: He doesn’t need four TaylorMade wedges to tackle the Quail Hollow Club. But he was there on Tuesday morning with four Sixties in the bag during a morning practice session.
Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson have found the winner’s circle with lob wedges—60 and 64 degrees, to be exact—over the course of their careers. But four lob wedges?! Four is pure madness.
It’s easy to look at McIlroy’s short game setup and wonder what he’s up to. But it’s also important to remember that it’s Tuesday in the Wells Fargo tournament, which means McIlroy can play with a full bag of pegs, and it won’t matter. Come Thursday, he’ll pick one TaylorMade MG3 wedge from the bunch and see how it works.
Only this is not the only any Taylor made a lob wedge.
As we’ve discussed many times in the field, different wedge grinds can benefit different course conditions, so it’s important to have options. In McIlroy’s case, he’s been searching for the best lopper (and grind) at his game since the end of last year when he began testing different wedges from his past in an effort to come up with a list of his likes and dislikes.
The goal of the feedback was simple: to provide TaylorMade designers with a blueprint for a future grind.
“[I]It will probably be 7 to 8 months [since I started testing different wedges]Because I started messing around with some Nike shoes at the end of last year,” McIlroy said. “There were some things I loved about them. When there are a lot of variables going on, you have to try to take some of the variables and see what you need to do.”
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What McIlroy kept picking up during the test sessions was how legendary club maker Mike Taylor’s wedge mill kept grinding through the turf.
“Depending on the conditions, I think ‘Mike Taylor Grind’ is good for all conditions,” McIlroy said. “It’s kind of where, if you go to the British Open, it might be good, and if you go somewhere like Oak Hill in a couple of weeks — where it can be soft — it might be good there as well. It’s quite versatile, where you are Some other soles are more specialized for the real narrow stuff, or wide soles are better for Bermudas. It’s good to have options.”
McIlroy’s wedges haven’t generated as much interest as the putter’s side this season—it will be again topic of conversation This week he’s back in TaylorMade’s Spider Tour Hydro Blast hammer – but that doesn’t make the changes any less interesting. A part of his game that was missing at times, McIlroy added Titleist wedges (SM9 54-10S, WedgeWorks 58.06K) to the bag at the start of the year in an effort to tighten up his short game. He went on to win that week in Dubai.
While the pegs seemed to work for a brief period of time, McIlroy continued to test behind the scenes and provide more feedback for the TaylorMade team. After months of in-house development and testing—including a post-master—McIlroy confirmed he was leaning toward using the “RM grind” he co-developed with TaylorMade at Quail Hollow.
“They seem to be doing really well,” said McIlroy. “Kind of a mixture of things that I had previously, like a little bit of a Nike wedge stuff, a little bit of a Vokey wedges stuff, just kind of trying to blend it together into the components that I like between the two, and come up with something that’s kind of like a mix of the two, which is what I think [TaylorMade’s] Really well done.
“This sole that I’m using—what I’m probably going to use this week—is the only one I’ve used a lot over the course of my career. It’s like that double-sole treadmill. Like all my Nike stuff it was kind of like this sole too. It’s a sole I really know, even Back in my TaylorMade days, that’s basically what I used.Obviously, I messed with like a [Titleist] K grind and T grind this year, but going back to what I know and what I chopped really well, and did really well with it. They stamp RM because it’s my specific head shapes, a certain sole, a certain leading edge, it’s kind of something we worked on together to get to a good place, and I think we’ve got it.”
As for the four 60-degree lobe wedges in the bag, they all have slight differences in the grind due to the different bounces. Depending on the course conditions this week and beyond, McIlroy has one to match on the turf. It’s a good thing you have one of the best players on the planet. (It should be noted that McIlroy also had the MG3’s 54-degree “RM” gap wedge in the bag as well, so the specific grind extends beyond the screw wedge.)
More importantly, McIlroy and Taylor Mead seem to have found something with the power to stick with it. With a Wells Fargo Championship and PGA Championship, the four-time major winner will soon discover if work leads to success on the course.
“We just put our heads together,” he said, “and I think we’ve come to a really good place.”
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