“I still consider J.P. one of my best friends, one of my closest friends, but sometimes to preserve a personal relationship, you might have to sacrifice a professional one, and that was sort of the decision that I came to in the end,” McIlroy said during a press conference at the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational at Firestone Country Club. “I was getting very hard on him on the golf course and I didn’t want to treat someone that – I don’t want to treat anyone like that. But sometimes this game drives you to that, but I felt like it was the right thing to do, and I don’t think there was any good time to do it.”

McIlroy phoned Fitzgerald last Tuesday with the news that he was making the change – two days after finishing T4 in The Open at Royal Birkdale following an awful start in which the Ulsterman bogeyed five of the first six holes of the championship. It was a pep talk from Fitzgerald that helped McIlroy make a remarkable turnaround and get in contention the final day, but that wasn’t enough to help Fitzgerald preserve a job he has had since 2008.

The split of McIlroy and Fitzgerald was the second high-profile team to dissolve this summer, following the break-up of Phil Mickelson and Jim “Bones” Mackay after the U.S. Open after a 25-year run.

McIlroy first picked up Fitzgerald after the 2008 U.S. Open when Fitzgerald stopped working with Ernie Els.

He admitted to being surprised that they remained a team for more than nine years, considering they missed the cut in their first three events together. But with Fitzgerald on the bag, McIlroy won four major titles, including back-to-back in the British Open and PGA Championship in 2014. Sandwiched in between a victory here at Firestone’s South Course. Currently, No. 4 in the world, McIlroy held the No. 1 spot for 95 weeks.

“I think we did as well as we could. We maybe could have won a couple of more times and we probably want a couple of rounds back that got away from us,” said McIlroy, who refrained from specifics, but probably would list the final round of the 2011 Masters as their nadir when McIlroy crashed to an 80. He won the U.S. Open in record fashion two months later at Congressional, but McIlroy still needs a green jacket to complete the career grand slam.

McIlroy, 28, has turned to childhood friend Harry Diamond to caddie for him the next few weeks, though it remains to be seen if Diamond, a fine golfer in his own right, having played with McIlroy on the youth team in Northern Ireland, is nothing more than a stop-gap selection before McIlroy turns to a more proven commodity.

In the meantime, McIlroy, who has been hampered by a rib injury for much of the year, said he is enjoying doing more of the legwork and computations on his yardages. It’s of a piece with the decision, in which he explained that he wanted to “take more ownership of his game.”

The split with Fitzgerald was amicable enough, however, that McIlroy wouldn’t rule out rehiring him.

“There’s nothing to say that J.P. mightn’t work for me again at some point, but right now I just felt like I needed a little bit of a change,” McIlroy added. “I hate the term fired or sacked or axed, because that’s definitely not what it was. I just changed my path a little bit, but maybe in the future that path might come back to where it was. Right now I just needed to mix things up a little bit, and J.P. understood that and we’re still all good.”

But who will give him that pep talk at the crucial time, he was asked?

“Hopefully,” McIlroy said with a grin, “I won’t need it.”

The post Rory McIlroy on ex-caddie: ‘I was getting hard on him, don’t want to treat anyone like that’ appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

But it is not surprising in that Fitzgerald, unlike Jim “Bones” Mackay with Phil Mickelson, was occasionally tagged as a poor fit for McIlroy. This perception began as early as 2011, when McIlroy carried a four-shot lead into the final round of the Masters, imploded on the back nine and Fitzgerald appeared to do little to pull him out of the funk. When the BBC’s Jay Townsend, a former European Tour player, suggested that McIlroy should hire a more reputable caddie like Steve Williams, McIlroy fired back on Twitter, and then elaborated on his response in greater detail.

“I’ve got to stand up for my caddie. JP is one of my closest friends, and I’ve had to deal with it for three years and not really say anything and he’s just kept at him and at him. I just had to say something,” McIlroy said at the time. “You know, it’s unfortunate that some people are so opinionated. It started in Switzerland back in 2008. JP has taken me from 200th in the world to major champion and now fourth in the world. I don’t know what it is about Jay or if he has something against JP but some of the criticism that JP takes from him is very unfair.”

Although Fitzgerald, who previously caddied for Paul McGinley and Darren Clarke, has been on the bag for all four of McIlroy’s major wins, he continued to contend with speculation that the player could do better. That sentiment was echoed by players and insiders quoted for a Golf Digest story in this year’s Masters preview. When assessing McIlroy’s chances of contending at Augusta National and completing the career Grand Slam, an underlying theme was that McIlroy needed a stronger voice by his side.

“How often do you see him and [caddie J.P. Fitzgerald] looking at each other in shock after his ball has finished 20 yards over the back?,” the story quotes an observer saying. “If you listen to them on the course, you often hear Rory asking, ‘What happened there?’ More than once I’ve heard J.P. saying something like, ‘OK, hit a soft draw with a 6-iron off that tree.’ And I’ve immediately thought, This ball is going over the green. And sure enough, it does. So you have to wonder. I see Rory up close only occasionally, and I know he’s going to hit the ball over the green when his caddie clearly doesn’t. It makes no sense.

“Rory needs someone to tell him what he needs to hear, not what he wants to hear.” . . . “Why he doesn’t employ Billy Foster is a mystery. Rory would have 10 majors by now if he did.”

“Of course, we know what Rory is like. He’s as stubborn as anyone on tour. The more people tell him that J.P. is not the right caddie for him, the more he’ll keep him on.”

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