PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — In the gear world, there is often a massive chasm between a "good number" on a launch monitor and the "right feel" when a tournament card is in your hand. Rory McIlroy highlighted that distinction this week ahead of his 2026 PGA Tour debut at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, pulling the plug on a brief, high-profile flirtation with TaylorMade’s P7CB cavity-back irons that began in January.

TaylorMade's Rors Proto blades—a set he used when winning at Pebble Beach a year ago and while securing the career Grand Slam with his Masters victory last April—are officially returning to the bag for the tournament’s defending champion.

The search for a change originally began as a quest for improved heel-toe forgiveness. Even for a player of McIlroy’s caliber, the long irons can occasionally be a source of frustration; he admitted in Dubai that if there was "help" to be had, he’d take it.

McIlroy noted that a slightly mis-struck 5-iron with his blades was occasionally falling 10-15 yards short instead of five. The P7CBs, with their compact but forgiving co-forged construction, seemed like the perfect compromise—offering a stabilizing cushion on off-center strikes without sacrificing the profile he preferred to see at address.

While the data suggested the P7CBs were doing exactly what they were designed to do, the subjective feedback started to tell a different story. For a player who has spent his entire professional life manipulating a blade, the cavity-backs introduced a variable he didn't expect: a persistent drift to the right with his shots.

"I felt like the cavity backs just had a little bit of a right bias in them," McIlroy said during his pre-tournament press conference. "So whatever way the weight of the head was or whether it was the blade length, I would hit shots … I'd make swings that I feel like I'd make with my blades that would be a very neutral ball flight. And then with the cavity backs, they would just start to tail off to the right."

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For McIlroy, it created a mechanical conflict. The added stability of the cavity-back meant the clubhead wasn't "releasing" at the rate he expected.

"I felt like in a way it’s not a bad thing because I don’t like seeing the ball go left," McIlroy said. "So it made me feel like I could fully release my iron shots, which is great in theory and great in practice, but then once you get on the course with a card in your hand, for so many years I'm used to feeling that like held-off position through impact."

The breaking point ultimately came during the heat of competition. In the controlled environment of a practice round, a player can adjust his timing to a new piece of gear. But during a competitive round, muscle memory takes over. McIlroy realized that trying to force a full release rather than relying on his natural, "held-off" feel wasn't working under pressure.

"It just didn't feel as familiar as I wanted it to," he admitted.

With the experiment officially in the rearview mirror, one of the most scrutinized bags in professional golf returns to a familiar state at Pebble Beach. The Rors Protos are back in the starting lineup, proving once again that in the battle between more forgiveness and decades of feel, familiarity usually wins out.