Memorial 36-Hole Round-Up: Rory Is Back! Rory Is Back!
/How about that great play from the lad, such a turnarou...what? Oh, that Rory? Really? The courtesy car ditcher?
That other Rory – Rory Sabbatini – played his best golf in the worst weather Friday at the Memorial and made a surprising appearance atop the leaderboard. Right behind him was a Tiger Woods that looked all too familiar.
He also noted this about Tiger, who lurks one back in search of his 73rd PGA Tour victory.
Woods looked strong for the second straight day, though he also had another double bogey that slowed his progress. What pleased him was controlling his ball in the wind for plenty of birdie chances that led to a 69.
''I hit the ball well all day, and it was a day that I needed to,'' Woods said. ''The wind was blowing out there, swirling in those trees, and it was just a tough day.''
Steve Elling noted that Woods did this with horrible allergies Thursday, and now a cold or flu bug that developed in round two.
Tiger Woods politely declined to shake hands with a couple of folks after his round at the Memorial Tournament, and not because he was upset with his round or didn't wanna mingle with the little people.
Somewhere over the course of the week, and it wasn't helped by the rain and 50-degree weather on Friday, he caught a cold of flu bug.
“Dude, this is June, right?” Woods said.
As for McIlroy, Dave Shedloski called it "another inexplicable display of desultory golf."
On the par-5 11th, McIlroy layed up poorly on the edge of a creek right of the fairway and then watched his third kick backwards into the water when he tried to hack his ball into the fairway from a thick lie.
"Probably a bit of bad judgment because I thought I could just chip it back out," said McIlroy, who finished fifth in last year's Memorial. "But if I had have examined the line maybe a little bit closer, I might have just taken a drop straight away."
When he drove into another creek left of the fairway at 14, it marked the fourth time that McIlroy had found a water hazard in two rounds.
Bob Harig noted that Rory's lousy play probably still won't be scrutinized like Tiger's.
And yet, you won't see McIlroy take the same kind of bashing Woods would receive if had missed three straight cuts. There will be no cries for McIlroy to dump his swing coach, Michael Bannon, who came over from Northern Ireland to help his star student this week.
Jim McCabe talked to Luke Donald, who sounded very excited to be chatting about his rival, but did offer a blunt take on Rory's troubles.
Donald shrugged.
“He made a few errors, careless errors. I’m sure when Rory puts a few solid rounds together he’ll be fine.”
Elling looked at Rory's day, with full quotes from the lad, and noted how long it's been since Rory played this poorly:
McIlroy, 23, last missed three straight cuts in August, 2008, on the European Tour.
Ashleigh Ignelzi and I discussed the first two rounds of the Memorial. It's about 5 minutes long:
And the PGA Tour highlights include Tiger's 194-yard 8-iron at 16.
