Inside Rory McIlroy's Bag: 7 Things I Noticed While Inspecting His Clubs

At 32-years-old, Rory McIlroy captured his 20th career PGA Tour victory on Sunday at the 2021 CJ Cup in Las Vegas. Twenty is a lot of wins, but for those who have been following his professional career, that number comes as no surprise.

McIlroy has always been an elite ball striker who overpowers courses with his long game prowess. It was only a matter of time until he stacked up 20 PGA Tour wins to go along with his four major championship victories.

While he’s struggled at times, especially over the last few years, McIlroy has regained internal confidence and is officially back to his winning ways.

Ahead of the 2021 CJ Cup, I was lucky enough to be able to go through McIlroy’s golf bag to take in-hand photos of all his golf clubs. It’s always fun to analyze the tools of the best players in the world, and see what they do differently with their equipment setups compared to the rest of us.

Below, I highlight the 7 interesting things I noticed about McIlroy’s gear, and what make his setup unique.

1) An insane wear mark on his hybrid

Throughout his career, McIlroy always gravitated to traditional long irons, driving irons or a 5-wood to fill the gaps at the top end of his set. Actually, he had never tested or tried a hybrid prior to 2020.

At the beginning of 2020, however, McIlroy became a hybrid guy by throwing a SIM Max Rescue 19-degree hybrid in his bag.

From the looks of it, he hasn’t missed the center of the face since he started using it. A wear mark like that doesn’t come from just a few shots; it comes from years of practice, and hitting the ball perfectly flush on the center of the face time and time again.

I guess we shouldn’t be shocked that one of the world’s best ball strikers has a wear mark like that, but for average amateur golfers, it’s still ridiculously impressive. On the sole of McIlroy’s hybrid, he also uses three strips of lead tape to help keeping the ball from hooking too much. For a refresher course on where to place lead tape to fix your equipment issues, check out our recent Lead Tape 101 article.

2) Slightly different shafts for different clubs

The shafts that you use throughout your 14-club setup are an underrated aspect of club fitting. Head models are important, but shafts can help control distance, dispersion, launch angle, spin rate, feel, and how the club head gets delivered to the golf ball. Choosing the right shaft for each club to match your needs and preferences is crucial.

For McIlroy, he makes a few notable shaft decisions. As a high-speed golfer, McIlroy uses Fujikura’s Ventus Black model in both his SIM2 driver and SIM fairway wood. The Ventus black is the lowest launching and spinning of the Ventus series. Interestingly, while he uses a 65-gram 6X version in his driver, he uses an 86-gram 8X model in his fairway wood. The more stout shaft build in his fairway should provide him more control and tighten dispersion.