From the TGG Archive · Rory McIlroy · Dubai · Short Game

Rory McIlroy, a Bunker on the Burj Al Arab — and Four Short-Game Lessons That Still Matter

In 2011, Rory McIlroy ended a landmark season by playing bunker shots from a specially built sand trap on the Burj Al Arab helipad. An original Jumeirah magazine page preserved in The Global Golfer archive turns the spectacle into something more useful: a compact lesson in bunker technique, commitment and practice.

Golf has produced plenty of publicity stunts. Very few become genuinely useful pieces of instruction.

At the end of 2011, Rory McIlroy stepped onto the helipad of Dubai’s Burj Al Arab with a wedge, a purpose-built bunker and the Arabian Gulf far below. The setting was deliberately extraordinary. McIlroy had won the U.S. Open at Congressional earlier that year and, as a Jumeirah brand ambassador, was one of the most recognisable young golfers in the world. Contemporary coverage recorded the shoot as one of his final golf appearances of the year, while the contractor responsible for the installation later documented the temporary putting surface and sand bunker created for the event.

What interests us now is not simply the height, the hotel or the photograph. It is what happened when the spectacle was translated onto the printed page.

An original copy of Jumeirah magazine in the TGG editorial archive carries a Rory column under the heading Tee Time with Rory. Alongside the remarkable images from the helipad, McIlroy explains several fundamentals of bunker play. More than a decade later, those fundamentals remain recognisable because they deal with the part of bunker technique that technology has not changed: how the club interacts with the sand.

The picture that stops you — and the lesson behind it

The defining photograph shows McIlroy standing inside a small bunker cut into a circular green on the Burj Al Arab helipad. It is the sort of image that makes the location the story. But McIlroy’s accompanying notes pull the reader back to ordinary golf: stop trying to help the ball into the air.

That is still the first fault to look for in a greenside bunker. Golfers see a lip, see sand between club and ball, and instinctively try to lift. The result is often a decelerating motion, a thin strike or a club that enters the sand in the wrong place.

The better picture is simpler: the club enters the sand before the ball and keeps travelling. The sand becomes part of the shot rather than an obstacle to it.

1. Don’t scoop: let the sand do the lifting

McIlroy’s first point in the original article is the one most club golfers need to hear. A standard bunker shot is not an attempt to pick the ball cleanly from the surface. The player commits to a point in the sand behind the ball, maintains speed through impact and allows the moving sand to carry the ball out.

TGG practice cue: draw a line in the sand at right angles to your target line. Place the ball just forward of that line and rehearse entering the sand on the line while the club continues through. The objective is not to hit harder; it is to remove the instinct to slow down.

2. A plugged lie is a different shot

The magazine also deals with the buried or plugged ball. McIlroy’s emphasis is on creating a steeper, more decisive strike into the sand rather than trying to reproduce the shallow splash of a normal bunker shot.

That distinction matters. A ball sitting down in its pitch mark will not normally emerge with the same height, spin or predictability as a cleanly sitting ball. The sensible expectation is therefore different: first get the ball out, then accept the release.

TGG course-management cue: when the lie is poor, choose the exit route before choosing the perfect finishing position. A safe recovery to the broadest part of the green is often the correct result.

3. The long bunker shot needs less splash, not more panic

Long bunker shots expose the weakness of an all-purpose technique. McIlroy’s notes describe changing the set-up and taking less sand as the required carry increases. That remains a useful principle: the farther the ball has to travel, the more efficiently the club must transfer speed.

The precise club and set-up will depend on lip height, sand depth, lie and distance. But the decision is the important part. A 35-yard bunker shot is not simply a five-yard bunker shot swung harder.

TGG practice cue: practise three carry distances from the same bunker with different clubs or different amounts of sand. Learn what produces 10, 20 and 30 yards rather than trying to invent the shot during a round.

4. Practice is what makes bunker technique reliable

The final message on the page is uncomplicated: bunker play needs repetition. That is particularly relevant because many golfers practise almost everything else more often. They hit drivers on the range, roll putts before a round and perhaps work on wedges from turf, but enter a bunker only when the scorecard forces them to.

Bunker confidence is difficult to fake. It comes from seeing the club enter the sand at the right point often enough that the motion no longer feels like an emergency.

Why this belongs in the TGG archive

The Burj Al Arab shoot sits at an interesting point in McIlroy’s career. He was 22, already a major champion, and still years away from many of the achievements that would define his later career. Dubai was also cementing its role as one of professional golf’s major winter destinations, connecting championship golf with international travel, hospitality and spectacle.

For The Global Golfer, the value of the page is therefore wider than nostalgia. It connects four subjects that now sit naturally together across TGG: elite golf, practical instruction, destination travel and the history surrounding memorable golf experiences.

Most importantly, it is primary archive material. The physical magazine gives us a contemporary record of how one of the game’s leading players explained the shot at the time. Our role is not to reproduce the old article. It is to preserve its context, test the golf ideas against the game we play today and make the useful parts accessible to a new reader.

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Editorial: The Global Golfer Editorial Team · Archive & Instruction

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