Rory McIlroy is over the egos, the agendas and the hurt feelings. For the four-time major winner, it is long past time that men’s professional golf come back together and end the fracture that is slowly strangling the sport.
Once an outspoken critic of LIV Golf, McIlroy no longer cares to critique the breakaway league, jab former LIV CEO Greg Norman or be disappointed with those who left the PGA Tour for a handsome paycheck.
That needs to all be water under the bridge.
As McIlroy sees it, LIV’s arrival has financially benefitted everyone, whether they stayed or left, and the grudge-holding that has caused some of the delay in the reunification of the game needs to end.
“Whether you stayed on the PGA Tour or you left, we have all benefited from this,” McIlroy said Wednesday after the pro-am at the Genesis Invitational at Torrey Pines. “I’ve been on the record saying this a lot: We’re playing for a $20 million prize fund this week. That would have never happened if LIV hadn’t come around. I think everyone’s just got to get over it, and we all have to say, OK, this is the starting point, and we move forward. We don’t look behind us. We don’t look to the past. Whatever’s happened has happened and it’s been unfortunate, but reunification, how we all come back together and move forward, that’s the best thing for everyone.
“If people are butt hurt or have their feelings hurt because guys went or whatever, like, who cares? Let’s move forward together, and let’s just try to get this thing going again and do what’s best for the game.”
While some PGA Tour players have been resistant to allowing LIV defectors to return to the PGA Tour without paying some sort of price, McIlroy is hopeful those players will start to see the bigger picture. After Strategic Sports Group invested $1.5 billion into the newly created PGA Tour Enterprises last January, players were given equity grants into PGA Tour Enterprises that come with an eight-year vesting period. These equity grants were created to encourage loyalty to stay on the PGA Tour.
As a stakeholder in the business and someone who cares about the direction of golf, McIlroy understands that what’s best for both is for the best players to play on one tour. If the PGA Tour has all of the top stars and not just some, the value of the business, and therefore their individual shares, goes up.
So, if a player left for LIV and still would have status on the PGA Tour, let them play, McIlroy said.
“Like for us, they’ve all got equity in this tour,” McIlroy said. “Having Bryson DeChambeau come back and play on this tour is good.”
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McIlroy doesn’t think the returning players should be automatically given equity in PGA Enterprises, but they can earn that over time.
Asked about his apparent about-face on LIV, McIlroy cited the amount of money he made in pre-LIV in 2019 compared to what he makes now and understands that change might not have happened had the breakaway league not fractured the sport.
That doesn’t mean McIlroy agrees with what happened. He still believes it was bad for the game, and while he has personally benefitted, he doesn’t think either the PGA Tour or LIV can go on like this.
“I didn’t feel that way initially because of the fracture,” McIlroy said. “It wasn’t good for the game. It wasn’t good for the overall game. It wasn’t good for either tour, I didn’t think. I think we’re both sort of like this has been great for the major championships. We all get together at the major championships and that’s been a really good thing, but for both tours, it’s unsustainable.”
Unifying the game comes with a lot of questions for which McIlroy doesn’t have answers.
Will LIV still exist? How will the game look? Will all LIV players want to come back? What will their schedule look like?
That’s all above McIlroy’s “pay grade.”
Now in the background of golf’s civil conflict, McIlroy is ready for the conclusion. For the conversations to stop centering around equity, mergers, monopolies, retribution and leverage, and for golf to return as the focus.
“I think we are closer to getting a resolution,” McIlroy said. “Hopefully, we can all just move forward.”