

Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.

Thus far, Rory McIlroy's new life as a Nike athlete hasn't gone well. The world No. 1-ranked player walked off the course in the middle of his ninth hole Friday, withdrawing from the Honda Classic, where he was defending champion. He was seven over par and had hit three balls into the water. After telling a small scrum of reporters, "I'm not in a great place mentally. I can't really say much, guys. I'm just in a bad place mentally," he swiftly left the premises by car.

An hour later, the 23-year-old Northern Irishman issued a statement apologizing for his withdrawal, which he attributed to a sore wisdom tooth affecting his concentration. A photographer caught him chomping on a sandwich minutes before withdrawing, causing some to doubt the explanation. PGA Tour policy prohibits a player from withdrawing except for injury, disability or serious personal emergency.

Rory McIlroy on Friday Getty Images

Ernie Els, who played with McIlroy Friday, said later, "I'm a great fan of Rory's, but I don't think that was the right thing to do." Some fans on social media also considered it bad form.

There were a host of other explanations, sensible or wild, including his romance with tennis star Caroline Wozniacki. The one-time No. 1 in her sport also has been playing poorly of late.

It was the third tournament this season for McIlroy. In his first, in Abu Dhabi after announcing a huge deal with Nike in January, swaddled in swooshes from head to toe and playing all Nike clubs (except sometimes the putter), he missed the cut. Last week in his second event, the Accenture Match Play in Arizona, he washed out in the first round.

It's too early to draw long-term conclusions about his adjustment. McIlroy's coach since boyhood, Michael Bannon, told me earlier this week he thought McIlroy would get used to the new equipment pretty quickly. "And pretty quickly for me would be two or three months," he said. In the short term, both McIlroy and Bannon said the major issue are swing flaws that crept in over the winter. "He's coming in under plane," Bannon said.

There are those, Nick Faldo most prominently, who say that changing everything all at once, including the ball, is a dangerous move. The transition can eat away at a player's confidence and mess with a well-grooved swing. Why take the risk?

Money, of course. Estimates of the multiyear deal McIlroy signed with Nike range up to $100 million. Every Tour player I talked to at the Honda thought McIlroy's move was a no-brainer. "For that kind of money, I'd switch to hickory sticks," said Johnson Wagner, a three-time Tour winner.

Wagner is unlikely to get the offer. McIlroy, Tiger Woods and possibly Phil Mickelson are almost certainly the only pros in the eight-figure range for equipment deals, according to an industry person who talked on the condition of anonymity. Even deals of $1 million or more a year are the province of only a few, primarily those in the world top 10, the person said.

Top pro golfers are independent contractors, and sponsorship revenue is an important part of their livelihood. But below that kind of money, switching even for more money isn't necessarily the right play. "I don't think I'd even talk about switching for $500,000. It would probably have to be $750,000 or $1 million to really think about it," said Ryan Palmer, another three-time Tour winner. If the new clubs cost him a few strokes at the wrong time, it wouldn't be worth it. "When you do the math, two top-five finishes more than pays the difference," he said.

Most equipment companies base their payments on formulas tied to a player's world and/or money-list rankings. The more of a company's products the player uses, the more he earns. The most valuable commodities are the driver and the ball, which consumers spend the most money on, followed by the hat, highly visible on television and always during interviews.

Even when players stay within one brand, they are frequently switching to new or improved clubs. "It's not really a difficult process," said Mr. Westwood, who has played Ping clubs for the past 26 years. "You try it out, and if it's no better, then you go back to the other stuff. The problem comes when you change manufacturer, because you can't go back to the other stuff if it's not as good."

That's what makes McIlroy's rare complete-bag switch to Nike from Titleist so difficult. The quality of Nike's clubs is not at issue. "Is there a difference between Nike's equipment and Titleist's equipment? Infinitesimal," Hall of Famer Nick Price, a Bridgestone player, told me. "All of the top five or six big companies these days are so very good. I know the Nike people, and they will make him clubs every bit as good [as] or better than he had."

Even if the heads, shafts, lies, lofts and weights of McIlroy's new clubs are identical to his old ones, however, they won't all feel the same. "Some clubs are easier to switch than others. You just pick them up and they work," said Charles Howell III, who switches individual clubs frequently, often from one tournament to the next, depending on conditions. "But other times it's not so easy."

Several pros told me that three woods are often the hardest to change. Wagner last year moved from Titleist to TaylorMade for his driver and three wood only. Getting comfortable with a new driver was a cinch, but he and the fitters in TaylorMade's equipment van, which follows the Tour, worked hard to get his three wood right. Eventually, by applying just the right amount of an adhesive epoxy known as rat glue to just the right spots on the inside of the crown, they got the club sounding and reacting the way Wagner liked. Two weeks after putting the club in play, he won the Sony Open in Hawaii.

Instead of taking off a month or more, as he usually does at the end of the year, McIlroy began working on his new sticks with Nike's equipment gurus in Fort Worth, Texas. All that range work away from competition may have been where the bad habits he and Gannon are now trying to fix snuck in.

McIlroy acknowledged after Thursday's round that he's still consciously working on his swing during play, which isn't what any elite player wants. McIlroy endured a slump last summer, missing four cuts in five events, which he broke out of only after deciding, on the range one day at the WGC Bridgestone in Ohio, to stop thinking about plane angles and positions and instead keep it simple. "I said, 'Why don't I just stand up and hit the ball where I want it to go?' "

That was the spark he needed. He finished tied for fifth that week and won the PGA Championship the next.

—Email John Paul at

Corrections & Amplifications
Charles Howell III plays with Titleist clubs and others. An earlier version of this column incorrectly called him a full-bag Titleist player.