sport news Wash your hands of it all, Rory, and try to fix your own game, rather than the ... trends now
To give a human slant to what we say about moths and flames, you might wish to picture a scene from last Thursday. It was about 7.30am in Toronto, so less than 48 hours on from golf’s strangest day, and Rory McIlroy was stood having a chat with Justin Rose ahead of their first round at the Canadian Open.
Together, they struck upon a sensible agreement to park any discussions about the wild thing that had just happened. Sure, they had a lot to say, and so does everyone else, but their plan was to focus on the chips and putts and at lunch they’d make sense of their mad new world. The reality? They were talking about it by the end of their first hole.
And that’s just the way it has been with McIlroy, still drawn to the same fire that has just burnt him.
Plenty has been said about him in this most astonishing of weeks and much of it veers between nonsense and ridicule. One comment was particularly well suited to the genre and it was shared by the American golf writer, Alan Shipnuck, who has been working on a book about the year his sport soiled its trousers. Its origin was an unnamed member of the LIV executive who, giddy at the merging of cartels, said none of their teams would want McIlroy to play for them. The reason? Because he is a ‘little bitch’.
Of course, that might tell us a bit about the brainpower in one corner of the LIV hierarchy. But it says more about the costs of entering a dung fight: if you win, you will probably still get hit, and if you lose, you get coated in the stuff. After a year at the vanguard, McIlroy just incurred a loss of sorts.
Rory McIlroy, right, and Justin Rose, left, discussed golf's shock merger during their round
McIlroy had described himself as a 'sacrificial lamb' having been a defender of the PGA tour
Or maybe we should phrase that differently — it was more a case of being sold out by the very people at the PGA Tour for whom he was fighting. He had scrapped for them, he leant his mind, time and name to the defence of their territory and, above all, he did not leave for Saudi fortunes. He did not cash out. But they did. A ‘sacrificial lamb’ is how McIlroy described himself, but had he said ‘shafted’, who would have split hairs about it?
The question now, as with any wounded athlete, is how McIlroy responds and whether he finally steps away from an energy-sapping issue that has yanked his ball so far into the long grass.
As the sport attempts to rebuild and rebrand as a happy family, the fear is McIlroy won’t be able to resist being drawn into the skirmishes that lie ahead. The Ryder Cup, compensation for those who stayed, penalties for those who didn’t, the future of Greg Norman, the need for teams, the extra strains on the schedule — these are all future battlegrounds in the house that hate built between the PGA Tour, DP World Tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. Some fights have stopped because of the merger, but many remain and can you see McIlroy staying out of it when he has been the soundtrack to this hijacking since its very beginning?
He has never succeeded in resisting for long, and that applies as much to when LIV first pitched its seedy tent a year ago, as it does now, when we are confirming what was always suspected: LIV was only ever a Trojan horse to enable the Saudi Arabian takeover of an entire sport. McIlroy has
