NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cwould still be the ideal scenario for golf as a whole.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m glad I was wrong,\u201d McIlroy quipped. \u201cI can admit when I\u2019m wrong, and that was one that I did get wrong. \u2026 I think everyone knows with everything that\u2019s 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\u2019s a tricky road to navigate.\u201d<\/p>\n
McIlroy said he started hearing about PIF\u2019s 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. \u201cNo, everything seems OK over here,\u201d McCormick said to McIlroy.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt just feels like the rug was pulled from under their feet and everyone was sort of blindsided by it,\u201d McIlroy said. \u201cBut again, that\u2019s the risk that those guys chose to take. \u2026 There\u2019s a lot of uncertainty in the air right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
McIlroy added that he\u2019s not privy to LIV\u2019s 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\u2019s past four years.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s a two-time PGA Championship winner, and at six major championships, he\u2019s tied with Nick Faldo for the most majors by a European in the modern era.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. \u2014 For much of the past year, Rory McIlroy was the one saying a deal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":640396,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[427,99,1794],"class_list":["post-640395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-sports","tag-sports-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/640396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}