Rory McIlroy drops major hint that he is going to try to play the PGA Championship

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Rory McIlroy injured his ankle playing soccer with his friends in June and was unable to defend his title at the British Open. 

He's since withdrawn from numerous tournaments, causing speculation to grow that the no. 1 golfer in the world will miss the final major of the 2015 season, the PGA Championship at Whistling Straits in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, a tournament where he is the defending champion.

This morning, however, McIlroy posted a very important picture to his Twitter that seems to reveal he may indeed be fit enough to compete in next week's tournament. Indulge us for a moment:

If you look closely, you can see faint blue line on the private jet's monitor pointing in the general direction of the U.S. Tell me, why would Rory be en route to the US, tweeting a potpourri of emoji - including a thumbs up AND a golf flag which could loosely translate to "plane to the U.S. to golf" - other than to reveal he's healthy and ready to take down Jordan Speith in the final major of the year?

If he were continuing to merely rehab his bad ankle and play practice rounds, well, couldn't he have done that in Portugal, or elsewhere in Europe? Wouldn't he have stayed off Instagram? The guy has 659k followers!

Plus, his injury seems to be getting better and better. Let's recap his progress, all via his Instagram.

Swelling on his ankle has definitely gone down:

 And he's used a medicine ball more this week than I have in the past year:

He seems to be hitting the driver decently well again:

And now he's jetting from Portugal to somewhere in the U.S. Dare we say that Rory is ... back?