NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. — For much of the past year, Rory McIlroy was the one saying a deal between the PGA Tour and LIV would be for the best.
Sure, he changed his stance from time to time, but in early 2025, it was McIlroy hoping that golfing with Donald Trump would get the president to serve as a dealmaker between the two golf tours. It was McIlroy who said unification “would still be the ideal scenario for golf as a whole.”
Therefore, when McIlroy was asked Tuesday about the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia pulling its funding from the startup league last month, he cracked some jokes.
“I’m glad I was wrong,” McIlroy quipped. “I can admit when I’m wrong, and that was one that I did get wrong. … I think everyone knows with everything that’s happening in the Middle East, that had a lot to do, but whenever you have funding tied so much to the geopolitical landscape in the world, that’s a tricky road to navigate.”
McIlroy said he started hearing about PIF’s potential strategy shift as far back as March. He reached out to his good friend, Ricky McCormick, who caddies for LIV golfer Tom McKibbin, to ask if they were hearing about it, too. “No, everything seems OK over here,” McCormick said to McIlroy.
“It just feels like the rug was pulled from under their feet and everyone was sort of blindsided by it,” McIlroy said. “But again, that’s the risk that those guys chose to take. … There’s a lot of uncertainty in the air right now.”
McIlroy added that he’s not privy to LIV’s future business prospects, but he did say that if LIV does exist with a full schedule in 2027, it will look far different from the league’s past four years.
McIlroy enters the PGA Championship this week at Aronimink Golf Club outside Philadelphia as the second-biggest betting favorite and coming off a win a month ago at the Masters. He’s a two-time PGA Championship winner, and at six major championships, he’s tied with Nick Faldo for the most majors by a European in the modern era.