Rory McIlroy returns to The Players with a massive new TaylorMade equipment deal

Rory McIlroy, while backing a proposal to move The Players Championship to March from this week in May, forgot for a moment the name of the tournament that takes place in April.

“I can definitely see why it would move back to March. It would then be a big event [on the PGA Tour] every month,” McIlroy said on Tuesday during a press conference ahead of Thursday’s start to The Players.

As he began listing the various super-sized tournaments — the PGA Championship in May (another potential change under new tour commissioner Jay Monahan), the U.S. Open in June, the Open Championship in July — the newly married winner of four major championships who’s 0-for-8 at the men’s first major of the season stumbled on the name of that particular competition.

“You’d have The Players in March, you’d have the, um, you’d have — the Masters, yeah, the Masters in April,” McIlroy, who celebrated his 28th birthday (May 4) by signing a huge new equipment deal with TaylorMade, said with a laugh after someone prompted him from the wings.

That contract, which McIlroy confirmed offhandedly during his presser, in stark contrast to the glitzy infomercial that accompanied his switch from Titleist to Nike gear in January 2013, will pay the world No. 2 $100 million to use TaylorMade clubs, balls, and golf bag for the next 10 years. That whopping amount is on top of the $200 million contract extension McIlroy recently inked to wear apparel from Nike, whose announcement in August that it would quit making golf supplies made the 28-year-old Ulsterman a free agent able to try whatever paraphernalia he chose.

McIlroy, whose game went into a tailspin after committing to Nike, will play with TaylorMade M2 woods, prototype blade irons, a 1-iron, and the TP5x ball. After complaining about the Titleist Pro V1x ball he used during the Masters, it was no surprise to hear McIlroy say that the smallest piece of new gear had the biggest impact on his decision to go with the tools of the trade for world No. 1 Dustin Johnson, Jason Day, and reigning Masters champion Sergio Garcia.

“I wasn’t really happy with the golf ball I was playing, and I needed to do something,” McIlroy said. “I felt like I struggled in the wind. So I sort of went back to the drawing board and tested for about 10 days pretty extensively after Augusta. Worked with a lot of different things, but I worked with the TaylorMade guys one day and started just on TrackMan [launch monitor] on the range and saw stuff with the golf ball, that new TP5x ball that they have. I thought, ‘Wow, this is what I need.’ This is exactly the thing that I’ve been struggling with, and this is, I feel, what I need.”

As for The Players proposition, Monahan hopes to overhaul the golf schedule to optimize viewership for the tour’s elite events while the NFL is on hiatus. In addition to shifting The Players back to March, when it was staged before it switched to May in 2007, golf’s postseason playoffs would be moved up as well. The Tour Championship would wrap up the season-long race to the $10 million FedExCup on Labor Day weekend rather than run into the end of September.

McIlroy’s “big event” comment may have come straight from the commish’s playbook.

“Having big events every month, culminating in the FedEx Cup playoffs in August prior to the NFL season, that would be a very powerful schedule,” Monahan told the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, according to multiple reports.

The Masters, of course, won’t be moving anywhere from its early April spot on the PGA Tour calendar. McIlroy, who wed Erica Stoll shortly after finishing T7 at this year’s Masters, needs a win at Augusta to complete the career grand slam. We’re confident he’ll remember where to be come April 5, 2018.