From the outside, there was something very funny about two recent Rory Moments, which is a phrase somebody smarter than me should trademark; there’s got to be a way to make money from the reliable way he appears out of nowhere, like a grinning whack-a-mole, every time you sense he’s been quiet just a bit too long. I only need a 50-percent cut for the idea, and maybe some credit for calling this latest when I wrote before the U.S.
Open that “Rory has been WAY too quiet lately, which makes me about 125 percent certain that something dramatic is going to happen with him soon. The man needs his attention.”
Anyway …
Moment One: On the Tuesday before the U.S. Open, when asked about the two-track system that PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp had teased and was about to unveil a week later, Rory McIlroy opted for a drive-by: “Track two is a glorified Korn Ferry event. That’s what track two is going to be.”
That was the money quote, but it wasn’t the only quote. He also offered this gem: “You start to realize that the way the tour was before LIV came along was actually pretty good … now that LIV looks like it’s less of a threat, as I said, the old ways of the PGA Tour weren’t actually that bad.”
Which sounds a little like saying, “Now that we’ve won the war after a disastrous beginning where the enemy caught us with our pants down, maybe there’s no need to have a standing army.”
There’s a third quote we need to highlight, and we’ll come back to it: “I play my schedule, and I’ll continue to play my schedule, which is getting less and less as the years go on.”
Now, as for the Korn Ferry stuff regarding the second tier—what is being called the Challenge Series—he’s not wrong, or at least not completely. But the back-biting undertone was shocking, even by the standards of the growing chasm between McIlroy and the tour that he once shielded with his own time and reputation and, yes, pain.
Rolapp would go on to have a quiet chat with him before making his big announcement last Tuesday, and at the press conference he spoke about their talk and offered his counter.
“I had a chance to speak with Rory today,” he said. “We talked a bit about it, and I think he’s made some comments publicly since then. But I think the best way to think about what we’re doing here is that right now we have 47 events at the PGA Tour. We’ll have 47 events going forward. That current model serves roughly 230 players. We’ll serve that amount of players, the same … we think we’ve just organized the same tour into a much more interesting and competitive system.”
One of Rolapp’s many talents seems to be getting people on board with his ideas, and it wasn’t long after his presser on Tuesday before Rory was singing the right tune, albeit in a statement released to the Golf Channel:
“Today’s announcement is a positive step for professional golf. As more details emerge, it is encouraging to see the PGA Tour reaffirming the importance of meritocracy and creating a structure that will serve both players and fans well into the future.”
And so the wayward son was brought back into the fold, briefly. But Rory’s original remarks at Shinnecock Hills were almost jaw-dropping when you consider the timing.
Sure, maybe Rolapp already had his votes and wasn’t exactly scrambling for support—in other words, a few barbed putdowns from McIlroy weren’t going to scuttle the deal—but I would have loved to be a fly on the wall in PGA Tour HQ when your biggest star comes out a week before a critical announcement to say, basically, “The Challenge events are second-class, things were better before, and also, I’ll be playing less and less, so that narrative you’re trying to spread about the best players showing up every week are at least one player short of true.”
It’s so undermining! It got some attention (not enough in the midst of a major) and highlighted just how much things have changed for the guy who served as the de facto player spokesman for the PGA Tour during the hottest years of the LIV war. Back then, McIlroy was your top soldier, a living embodiment of the fantasy superhero that commissioner Jay Monahan had scripted for Tiger Woods, taking bullet after bullet and suffering for his valor while stars like Jordan Spieth and Scottie Scheffler mostly stayed quiet.
Now? You can’t even get the guy to play in all of the signature events. Which brings us to …
Moment Two: Where was McIlroy this week instead of the Travelers? Chumming it up with Nick Faldo at Royal Birkdale, where he seems to be reprising the Augusta tactic of playing a major course early and often to gain an advantage.
Yet again, funny as this is from the outside, it has to be wildly irritating in Ponte Vedra. The words stung more, I’m sure, but this was still a direct one-man refutation of the concept of the Championship Series Rolapp outlined, where even outside the majors and the Players, you’re going to get all the stars in the same spot. A nice idea, but there’s Rory wagging his finger, saying, “Not this star.”
It’s head-spinning stuff, and it’s hard not to wonder if there’s actual animosity brewing.
It would make sense, considering the fallout from Rory’s stint as the tour’s good soldier. In late 2023, after feeling like a “sacrificial lamb” who was blindsided by that summer’s fake merger (not an unfair assessment), he resigned his spot on the PGA Tour’s Policy Board. At around the same time, vis-a-vis LIV, he pulled a total about-face—if Rory’s not pulling an about-face, is he truly Rory?—and became the No. 1 tour-side cheerleader for a merger.
Without getting too deep into the mechanisms behind why he changed his mind, in early 2024 he was suddenly saying things like, “Having a diminished PGA Tour and a diminished LIV Tour or anything else is bad for both parties. It would be much better to be together and move forward together for the good of the game.”
It wasn’t just a tepid mood change, either; McIlroy suddenly seemed very invested. So much so that when Spieth said at Pebble Beach that he didn’t think a PIF deal was necessary anymore, largely because of the new SSG investment, it irritated Rory to the extent that he quit a group text chain of fellow players and had a long phone call with Spieth. When he spoke to the media afterward, McIlroy was full of concern with how LIV would react to Spieth’s words, because the new word buzzing around his brain was “unity.”
“Having PIF as your partner as opposed to not having them as your partner, I don’t think is an option for the game of golf,” McIlroy said.
Of course, he was dead wrong. It was an option—in fact, it was the best option—and even back then people like Spieth and those in tour leadership were starting to realize it. It’s not like they could have predicted the Iran war and the total reversal on investment strategy within Saudi Arabia, but for the first time they started to sense that maybe the “merger” had given them breathing room (especially from legal fees), that maybe time was on their side, and that maybe this thing was winnable.
So yes, Rory had picked the wrong time to change his tune (his timing was impeccably bad throughout the process), and there’s also this: A great way to have influence on these things beyond pulling up the soapbox at press conferences is to be—wait for it—on the Policy Board. Which he quit. They even invited him back just a couple months later so he could use his voice for something other than sniping.
But McIlroy said no due to “scar tissue” and things being “pretty complicated and pretty messy,” which is apparently the kind of thing you say when you keep getting outmaneuvered by a man as disagreeable as Patrick Cantlay.
Then time took its toll on LIV, the Saudis bailed, and now in the midst of the transformation of the tour, Rory is suddenly pining for the good old days, albeit while skipping three signature events and finding himself on pace to miss the minimum events played requirement of 15.
So, to arrive back at the main question: What does Rory want from the PGA Tour? Does he want them to love him again? Is he bridling at his lack of control? Is he, quite reasonably, annoyed that he went from their poster boy in the hard times to ignored and left behind when the tides of battle turned? Is there any way to deny that there’s some real, lingering bitterness here?
And most pressing of all, what’s going to happen when 2028 comes, and the best players in the world have their marching orders to play all (or most) of Rolapp’s new Championship Series? It’s clear from Rory’s own words that he’s not up for that kind of commitment, and as messy as things have been in the past two years, the biggest confrontation may be yet to come.
