Last night Rory McIlroy won the Wells Fargo Championship at Quail Hollow, North Carolina, the course where in 2010 he won for the first time on the PGA Tour. A final round of 65 saw him blitz past Xander Schauffele to register his fourth win at this venue, making it consecutive wins on the PGA Tour after his victory with Shane Lowry at the Zurich Classic in New Orleans a fortnight ago.
Off the course, McIlroy’s recent attempt to reclaim his place on the PGA Tour board as one of its six player directors, an opportunity that arose when Webb Simpson offered to stand down in order to make way for him, was scuppered by what the Tour dressed up as administrative protocol but in reality seemed to be a specific effort to exclude McIlroy, who strongly believes the only sensible way forward to resolve the schism in professional golf is for the Tour to strike a deal with the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), the vehicle behind LIV Golf. The Irishman will therefore be out of the loop when it comes to being involved in discussions with Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of the PIF. Instead there will be a five-man team charged with that task – Jay Monahan, the Tour’s commissioner; Joe Gorder, the board chairman; John Henry of the Fenway Sports Group, part of the Strategic Sports Group consortium which has invested $1.5 billion in the Tour; Joe Ogilvie, a director of the Tour; and Tiger Woods, who needs no introduction.
I’m not making any apology for now completing a hat-trick of blog references to Iain Carter’s book, Golf Wars. In it, the European tour pro Eddie Pepperell said of Monahan: “For him to turn round and say that after sitting down with Yasir for 10 minutes he’d learned he could trust the guy [which is indeed what Monahan said after finally agreeing to meet him], I mean you’ve had two years to sit down with this guy for 10 minutes. That’s an outrageous thing to say, given everything that’s transpired in the last 12 months, and again it is an inability to look beyond the borders of the US to see what’s happening in the wider world.”
That may be so. On a broader point, McIlroy said recently: “Do the American players that are [essentially] used to playing all their golf in America want to travel outside of the States 12 times a year?” – which one would imagine would be an inevitable consequence of any deal between the PGA Tour and the PIF. There is no suggestion of the DP World [European] Tour being involved in any negotiations and, with McIlroy sidelined, the six players on the PGA Tour board are Woods, Simpson, Patrick Cantlay, Peter Malnati, Jordan Spieth and Adam Scott. You will realise that only the latter is not American.
Related: Rory McIlroy denies Tiger Woods rift
It is approaching a year since Monahan shocked his members by announcing a framework agreement between the PGA Tour and the PIF and very little seems to have occurred since. Global Golf Post reported last week that “there are no meaningful discussions happening between the Tour and the PIF” even if it hopefully suggested “discussions between the two sides could soon intensify” given the formation of the five-man committee. As to that, when in 1927 Charles Lindbergh completed the first solo non-stop transatlantic flight, his feat was universally acclaimed – except by one wit who offered “not so great as if he’d done it with the help of a committee”. Let’s see how this one works out.
After the sweetness of yesterday, McIlroy now heads to this week’s USPGA Championship at Valhalla, the very place he won his last major all of 10 years ago and very much hoping to do the same again. He’s been a long time seeking the fifth.
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