At this week’s 2026 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, Rory McIlroy is making his first PGA Tour start of the year. But in his pre-tournament press conference on Tuesday, it was an anecdote from McIlroy’s 2025 Masters win that caught this writer’s attention.
It turns out that when McIlroy arrived home Monday after the Masters, a “pretty important club” was unexpectedly missing from his golf bag. The culprit might come as more of a surprise: Augusta National.
Here’s what you need to know.
Rory shares missing Masters club story ahead of PGA Tour debut
This week is not McIlroy’s first tournament of the season. As he usually does, the World No. 2 got his year started on the DP World Tour, playing two tournaments in the Middle East.
In his very first start, he earned a T3 at the Dubai Invitational. But now McIlroy is ready to get his PGA Tour season underway, and he’s doing it at the same place he debuted last year: Pebble Beach.
That debut resulted in a victory and sparked a run that included wins at the Players Championship and, shortly thereafter, the Masters.
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McIlroy’s Masters win was memorable for many reasons, none more so than the fact that with it McIlroy became just the sixth golfer to complete the career Grand Slam.
But when McIlroy arrived home following his dramatic win, he looked into his golf bag only to find that one of the 14 clubs that earned him the win was missing.
“I didn’t realize this, but I flew back the day after on the Monday and I basically didn’t see my golf clubs since like post the playoff and I saw that my 7-iron was missing,” McIlroy shared on Tuesday at Pebble Beach. “I was like, that’s a pretty important club.”
So where was his trusty, Masters-winning 7-iron? It turns out that it never made it onto the plane.
Augusta National has a tradition of keeping one essential club from memorable Masters wins to display at the clubhouse. Given the historic nature of McIlroy’s victory, club officials wanted something with which to memorialize the tournament.
McIlroy’s manager Sean O’Flaherty obliged, giving Augusta the 7-iron McIlroy used during his victory.
One problem: he forgot to tell Rory,
“Sean had already given it to the club, he just didn’t tell me,” McIlroy revealed on Tuesday. “That’s fine, I’ll get a new 7-iron. If there was one I was going to give the club, it was probably going to be that one.”
McIlroy confirmed that he had to get a replacement for his next start, the Zurich Classic of New Orleans, where he and Shane Lowry finished T12 a year after winning. In his next tournament, McIlroy earned a T7-finish at the Truist Championship.
McIlroy wants to ‘move on’ from Masters win
McIlroy’s 2025 Masters triumph was his third of the season at that point. Though he collected four more top-10 finishes, he didn’t win another Tour event in 2025.
The five-time major champion acknowledged as much in his Pebble Beach press conference.
“If I had a critique of myself last year is that I didn’t bring the consistency that I maybe would have wanted post the Masters,” he shared on Tuesday.
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And improving on his consistency, he argued, is the only chance he has of supplanting World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler in the world ranking.
“I think anyone that wants to catch Scottie [Scheffler] or get anywhere close is going to have to consistently bring that sort of game week in and week out like he does,” McIlroy said. “He’s really the first one since Tiger that’s doing this.”
While Rory admitted he was “going over to Jim Nantz’s house later” to do an interview in his Masters green jacket, he said that he’s ultimately ready to move on from his historic victory and focus on accumulating even more accomplishments this year.
“It’s done, it’s wonderful, I’m happy that it’s over in a way,” McIlroy said of his 2025 Masters win, “but I want to move on and I’ve got more goals and there’s more things I want to try to accomplish and achieve.”
Step No. 1? Defending his title this week at Pebble Beach.