What price Rory McIlroy? It is a question LIV Golf’s Saudi backers must be legitimately pondering having snared the supposedly unsnarable Jon Rahm.
McIlroy, as the voice of the PGA Tour for most of the LIV conflict, is universally viewed as untouchable, out of range whatever the number.
But the same was thought about his European Ryder Cup teammate.
If this week’s bombshell Rahm defection has proven one thing about golf’s unstable plate tectonics, it is never to rule out anything.
LIV, drifting into irrelevance and seemingly ripe to be mothballed, is suddenly back front and centre – and with a cast-iron A-lister on board after the staggering £450m swoop.
The deep pockets of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund – with their Hermione’s handbag design structure – can turn pledges of loyalty to confetti.
There has been no more staunch loyalist to the establishment than McIlroy.
But he has mellowed in his criticism of those who have taken the LIV shilling and was notably supportive of Rahm’s right to choose whatever he thought was best for him in the wake of this week’s announcement.
After being the PGA Tour’s player voice for so long, McIlroy quietly quit its board last month. The official explanation – that it was taking too much of his time – was accurate up to a point but where McIlroy had come around to the conclusion that golf would be better off with the PIF inside the tent as part of the solution, he found himself outnumbered by more hawkish voices around the PGA Tour table.
Those parties include one Tiger Woods.
In stepping down after five years, McIlroy came to the conclusion that Woods’s voice would be the one that carried furthest.
Woods holds little truck with a US sporting institution getting into bed with the sovereign wealth fund of a Gulf oil state as the PGA Tour pledged to do in signing a framework agreement to join forces back in June.
He wants the PGA Tour to pivot towards the American investor groups who have expressed an interest in an alternative Stars and Stripes-coloured collaboration. They include Liverpool’s owners, Fenway Sports Group, and Eldridge Industries which is the holding company of Chelsea’s Todd Boehly.
