Rory McIlroy ‘so sick’ of discussing the ‘not-so Super League’

LOS ANGELES – Rory McIlroy has been unequivocal in his position: He’s pro-PGA Tour, to his core, and he’s long been tired of talking about any potential rival leagues.

“Oh, I’m so sick of it,” he said with disgust Wednesday at the Genesis Invitational, where he’ll make his first Tour start of 2022.

The current chairman of the Tour’s Player Advisory Council, McIlroy knows perhaps better than any player what the future looks like on this circuit. What other plans the Tour has in the works. How significantly the purses will swell. Over at least the past decade, McIlroy said, the Tour has hit its marks in any financial forecast, and he expects the same for the foreseeable future despite the current turbulence in the golf landscape.

Full-field scores from The Genesis Invitational

He put it this way: “There’s a ton of guys out here that are going to get rich if they play well.”

That still won’t be enough to satisfy some players, of course, with rumors continuing to swirl about a Saudi-backed Super Golf League – or the “not-so-Super League,” McIlroy joked. Despite all of the bluster, no players have publicly committed to the breakaway circuit, and McIlroy was asked whether he was curious to see whom would first make the leap.

“Certainly for the younger guys, like, it just seems a massive risk,” McIlroy said. “I can maybe make sense of it for the guys that are getting to the latter stages of their career, for sure. I don’t think that’s what a rival golf league is really – that’s not what they’re going to want, is it? They don’t want some sort of league that’s like a pre-Champions Tour.”

Instead, he pointed to the top players in the world, many of whom have already thrown their support behind the Tour in what is fast becoming an us-vs.-them scenario: world No. 1 Jon Rahm, as well as Collin Morikawa, Patrick Cantlay, Justin Thomas, Jordan Spieth and other boldfaced names.

“You look at the people who have already said ‘no,’” McIlroy said. “You’ve got the top players in the world who are saying ‘no,’ so that has to tell you something.”