Each round at this year’s PGA Championship, Rory McIlroy has had something different to say. Thursday, it was a blunt, one-word verdict on his round. Friday, it was the course setup. After settling for a 66 on Saturday, McIlroy was asked about what led to the wonderful improvement, and his response was candid.

“Yeah. I’m going to sound like a broken record, but the first few days, the wind on the range has been left to right, and it’s just been tough. Last week at Quail Hollow was the same, and my path starts to get more and more left with a left-to-right wind, and that’s not my pattern,” he told the media.

“If anything, my path would be out to the right with the driver. So it was just trying to get the TrackMan out, look up the path and face numbers, and just try to get them a little bit more to the right and get a feeling in transition where I let my right shoulder relax in transition instead of trying to get the club back out in front of me. That’s sort of the feeling that I went with the driver, and that’s helped.”

On Thursday, McIlroy hit just five fairways and finished with four consecutive bogeys. At one point, he also slammed his driver into the turf after a missed fairway on the fourth hole. His frustration had a reason: the sharp wind.

During the first two days of the 2026 PGA Championship, golfers faced cold, gusty winds. On the first day, winds consistently blew at 12 to 13 mph, with strong gusts reaching up to 25 mph in the afternoon, making club selection highly unpredictable. Then, on Friday, conditions remained challenging. Winds were blowing out of the northwest at 10 to 15 mph and gusts peaking between 22 and 24 mph.

McIlroy plays the TaylorMade Qi4D, a club he moved to in November 2025 under his long-running $100 million deal with the brand. He tested it extensively before committing and has used it every start since.

At the Truist Championship, conditions weren’t favorable. It was rainy and windy. It rained on Wednesday night and Thursday morning, delaying tee times. Later in the evening, there was a sudden increase in wind and thunder, and it made the course brutal. Even the forecasts for the weekend indicated sustained winds between 12 and 18 mph on Saturday, accompanied by gusts and additional rain. McIlroy finished 19th there.

Other pros have also complained about the wind at Aronimink. Scottie Scheffler called the wind and green setup “absurd.” Justin Thomas noted that the combination of wind speed and direction, when paired with severe pin placements, made certain greens nearly impossible to hold.