While the old saying may be ‘drive for show, putt for dough’, it does appear to be increasingly important to be lethal with the longest club in the bag if you are going to be successful on the PGA Tour.
It says a lot that it is Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler who sit in the top two positions when it comes to strokes gained off the tee on the PGA Tour so far in 2025.
Of course, the pair have won six times between them this year. Among those wins are McIlroy’s victory at The Masters and Scheffler’s triumph at the PGA Championship.
Interestingly, not everyone needs to hit the ball off the tee quite like McIlroy to contend at the highest level.
Collin Morikawa suggests the mistake that many players make with the driver
Collin Morikawa is actually down in 156th for driving distance on the PGA Tour this year, with the two-time major champion averaging 292.6 yards off the tee. However, he is also 19th for strokes gained off the tee.
Clearly, accuracy is crucial to Morikawa’s game. He is second for driving accuracy on tour, while no-one has put a lower percentage of their tee shots in the left rough than the 28-year-old.
And speaking to McIlroy in a video for TaylorMade, Morikawa explained his approach to driving the ball. He also shared what mistake he sees too many players make when it comes to using the driver.
“For me, it’s having a consistent shot shape. It’s using the fairway as much as I can. Just how you can use speed and work the ball and work the shot, I like to play obviously the cut and the fade. I try and take the left side out of play where I can aim as far left as I want and just know the ball’s never going there. And for me, that’s going to maximise the fairway, maximise my miss. Speed, for me, the speed, being a little bit slower, it helps a little bit. The faster you are, the more offline you are. You’ve still got to hit fairways,” he said.
“I focus so much on hitting centre of the face. People, they don’t get lazy, but they see the face that’s getting so much bigger and so much more forgiving, it’s good, but you’ve still got to want to hit the centre. And for me, when I’m off, I’m most likely hitting it a little bit off the toe, so I like to just focus on hitting it centre of the face and playing the cut.”
The decision Rory McIlroy made with his swing which he came to regret
McIlroy himself will probably admit that Morikawa is spot on in his assessment – and it is not just golfers at a lower skill level who can be guilty of losing their way.
One of the decisions McIlroy would go on to regret came in 2020 when he attempted to try and keep up with Bryson DeChambeau, who had won that year’s US Open after undergoing a dramatic body transformation.
“Where it all stems from is probably like October last year, doing a little bit of speed training, started getting sucked into that stuff. Swing got flat, long, and too rotational. Obviously I added some speed and am hitting the ball longer, but what that did to my swing as a whole probably wasn’t a good thing. So I’m sort of fighting to get back out of that. That’s what I’m frustrated with,” he said in 2021, as reported by The Telegraph.
“Why did I do it? I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t anything to do with what Bryson did at the US Open. I think a lot of people saw that and were like, whoa, if this is the way they’re going to set golf courses up in the future, it helps. It really helps.”
That decision definitely set McIlroy back at a time when he should have potentially been at something like the peak of his powers.
It could certainly act as a warning to some who are considering throwing much of their good work away to head down a completely different path.
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