The medical bulletin a major champion does not want to be issuing on the Tuesday of a major week is the one where the player in question has, on his own initiative, removed a toenail. Rory McIlroy spent part of Tuesday morning at Aronimink talking to Irish reporters about the toenail on his right pinky toe, which he has taken off in an attempt to reduce the pressure of the shoe on a blister he has been carrying since the closing rounds at Quail Hollow. He played three holes of his planned practice round in the afternoon, sat down on the fourth tee, removed his sock, fiddled with his foot for several minutes, and then walked off. The decision to abandon the round was made in consultation with his caddie and the player who had joined him for the practice. The walk back to the clubhouse was not the walk of a player whose Thursday tee time, scheduled for eight forty in the morning alongside Jon Rahm and Jordan Spieth, is in any kind of doubt. It was, however, the walk of a player whose week is going to be played around a piece of his anatomy that has not previously been a feature of any pre-tournament press conference of his career.
The blister itself is the kind of injury that, in any other line of work, would be filed under the category of mild inconvenience. The pinky toe, on a player whose practice routine and tournament walk add up to somewhere north of fifteen miles a week, is the part of the foot that takes the load on the lateral side of every weight transfer and absorbs most of the friction inside a stiffened tournament golf shoe. The blister has formed underneath the nail, which is the part of the toe that the player cannot easily reach with a pad or a tape job. The decision to remove the nail entirely is the decision of a player who has run out of patience with the workarounds. The further decision to size up the shoe by half a size, which McIlroy mentioned to the same reporters, is the more interesting one. A change in the size of the shoe a player is wearing in the rounds of a major championship is the kind of variable that will, on a course as long and as undulating as Aronimink, be felt by the player on the back nine of every round.
What the foot has been doing since Quail Hollow
The trail back to the start of the problem runs to the closing round of the Truist Championship at Quail Hollow last Sunday. McIlroy was visibly limping in the back nine of his final round. He told reporters at the time that the issue was a blister, that he had been managing it through the week, and that it had not affected the rounds. The limp suggested otherwise. He shot one of his weaker Sundays of the year. He finished outside the top fifteen at a course that has, historically, been the closest thing to a home event he has on the American calendar. The post-round explanation was that the foot had been bothering him for three rounds and that he had been swinging around it. The swing of a player who is favouring the lateral edge of his lead foot is a swing that loses, on the longer iron shots in particular, the hip clearance that produces the trajectory the player needs into a firm green. The Sunday round at Quail Hollow looked, to anyone who has watched McIlroy’s lead-foot work over the years, like a round played by a player whose footwork was not quite committed to the shot.
The week in between was meant to be the rest period that allowed the foot to settle. The Tuesday practice round at Aronimink, in the new shoes, was the first proper test of whether the rest had worked. Three holes was the answer.
Why this matters at Aronimink in particular
Aronimink is one of the longer courses on the major rota. The yardage on the championship card is somewhere over seven thousand five hundred yards. The walk between greens and tees, on a Donald Ross property where the routing was laid out for foot traffic rather than carts, has the additional distance that the long modern major-championship course produces. The player who is walking on a foot that is not entirely comfortable will, by the back nine of a Saturday or a Sunday, be the player whose lower-body action on the longer clubs is the part of the swing that goes first. The player who lengthens the shoe by half a size will also, on the firm-and-fast pinches that the course staff have prepared for the back-nine pin sheets, be the player whose feet are slightly looser inside the shoe and whose ground reaction force, on the longer wedge shots in particular, is the part of the swing that the new fit will not quite support.
The other piece of context that makes the Aronimink week a particularly inconvenient one for the foot to have decided to act up is the look of the field at the top of the betting market. McIlroy is the second pick at roughly eight to one. He is coming in off a Masters win in April. He has, in the months since Augusta, played the kind of golf that the broadcast had been quietly hoping for since the second leg of the career grand slam was finally completed in 2024. The pressure on a Tuesday practice round in week of a major he has already won twice, in a year in which he has already won the Masters and could conceivably leave Aronimink with a third Wanamaker, is the pressure of a player whose career arc is, at the moment, the most interesting one in the field. The toe blister is not the variable any of the broadcasts had factored in.
Thursday morning at eight forty
The pairing the PGA of America has put together for Thursday morning is one of the most-watched groups of the day. McIlroy will play with Jon Rahm and Jordan Spieth, in a group that the broadcast has every reason to follow for as many holes as the camera schedule allows. Rahm has been in form since the LIV season started in February. Spieth is back at the PGA Championship attempting, again, to complete the career grand slam. McIlroy is the player at the top of the betting market in the group. The question that the eight forty tee time will answer, in a way that the Tuesday afternoon practice round did not, is whether the foot has settled enough to support a four-round championship.
The history of major championships does not have many examples of a player who pulled out on the morning of a Thursday round because of a blister. There are several examples of players who started a round, played eight or nine holes, decided they could not continue, and walked off. McIlroy is not a player who has, in any phase of his career, walked off a round he had started. He started in his Saturday at Pinehurst with a foot that he later said had been a problem since the front nine. The expectation, as the practice round at Aronimink ended on Tuesday afternoon, is that he will tee off on Thursday morning and play through whatever the foot is going to do over the four days. The expectation may, of course, be wrong. The pinky toe is the part of the body that the player has the least control over. The shoe is the part of the equipment that the player cannot easily change in the middle of a round.
The week may, in the end, produce a McIlroy who has compensated for the foot through the kind of grind a major Sunday tends to require, and who arrives at the back nine on Sunday in contention. It may, equally, produce a McIlroy who plays four rounds at six over and finishes the week well outside the top fifty. The variable nobody had planned for is the one the week is now built around. The toe will, by Sunday evening, be the most discussed body part of any major champion in the post-round interview area, regardless of which way the week goes.