Rory McIlroy said Wednesday that he is willing to rejoin the PGA Tour policy board if the other player directors want him.
As first reported by the Guardian, Webb Simpson has submitted a letter stating that he’d like to resign from the board, but only if his vacant seat is filled by McIlroy, who stepped down last fall because of the toll it had taken on him professionally and personally.
Five months later, what has changed?
“I think I can be helpful,” McIlroy said Wednesday ahead of the Zurich Classic of New Orleans, where he is partnering with Shane Lowry. “I don’t think there’s been much progress made in the last eight months, and I was hopeful that there would be. I think I could be helpful to the process. But only if people want me involved, I guess.”
McIlroy’s position would again be put up to a vote, just as it had last November when the other five player directors – Simpson, Tiger Woods, Patrick Cantlay, Adam Scott and Peter Malnati – chose Jordan Spieth to serve out the remainder of McIlroy’s initial term, through 2024.
Over the past few months McIlroy has been adamant that the Tour needs to reach a final agreement with the Saudi Public Investment Fund after what has been a tumultuous two-year period that has seen the elite men’s professional game fractured by the arrival of LIV Golf. He reiterated again Wednesday in New Orleans that unification is the best route: “I think it’s the only way forward for the game of golf.”
Once the fiercest critic of LIV Golf and its Saudi backers, McIlroy’s public U-turn has put him at odds with some of the Tour’s most influential voices. McIlroy described his relationship with Cantlay as “average at best” and said that they view the world differently, while McIlroy and Spieth had a public disagreement over whether a deal with the PIF was still necessary following a multi-billion investment from the Strategic Sports Group.
When asked how he will try to navigate those dynamics moving forward, if he were to rejoin the board, McIlroy said: “Compromise, but also try to articulate your points as well as you can and try to help people see the benefits of what unification could do for the game and what it could do for this tour in particular. We obviously realize the game is not unified right now for a reason, and there’s still some hard feelings and things that need to be addressed, but I think at this point for the good of the game, we all need to put those feelings aside and all move forward together.”
Part of the reason why McIlroy stepped down last year was because of the weight of the personal and professional responsibilities, saying that he was hopping on lengthy calls two or three times a week that took away from some of his other interests at home. For a time, at least, the added burden seemed to boost his golf – he enjoyed one of his best statistical seasons in 2022 – but he began to view the time commitment differently after the surprise framework agreement last summer.
“We’re golfers at the end of the day; we don’t need to be trying to run a $15 billion business,” McIlroy said Wednesday. “We need to go out there and play golf and let the business people do the business things.”
But McIlroy also recognized that this is a crucial period in the sport’s history, with the two warring sides still seemingly far apart from a final agreement. His addition to the board would largely be viewed as a positive step given his built-in relationships not just with Fenway Sports Group, which is investing in the Tour, but also because he has had conversations with PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan and his long-term vision for the sport.
“I feel like I care a lot, and I have some pretty good experience and good connections within the game and around the wider sort of ecosystem and everything that’s going on,” he said. “But at the end of the day, it’s not quite up to me to just come back on the board. There’s a process that has to be followed. But I’m willing to do it if that’s what people want, I guess.”
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