rory mcilroy
Rory McIlroy: The Last Romantic in the Age of Sport-Washing
By Our Man in the Rough
DUBAI — While the rest of us are busy price-checking canned beans and wondering which hemisphere will ignite first this summer, Rory McIlroy is still out there trying to hit a tiny sphere into a slightly larger hole with a stick that costs more than the average Ukrainian monthly salary. It’s almost quaint, in the same way that typewriter repair shops are quaint: admirable, anachronistic, and doomed.
McIlroy’s recent refusal to sign onto the Saudi-funded LIV Golf circus—an event that combines the subtlety of a gold-plated sledgehammer with the moral clarity of a Bond villain—has made him the de-facto conscience of a sport that long ago traded its tweed blazer for a ballistic vest full of petrodollars. By declining the reported half-billion on offer, McIlroy has become either (a) the last man standing on the deck of the Titanic with a violin instead of a life raft, or (b) the only player who read the fine print and noticed the clause about “soul forfeiture.” The jury’s still out, but the jury is currently sequestered on a super-yacht off the coast of Neom, so don’t hold your breath.
The global implications are deliciously ironic. Here is a 34-year-old from County Down, population roughly the same as a Shanghai apartment block, single-handedly propping up the PGA Tour’s claim to ethical superiority—an organization, mind you, whose corporate partners include the same fossil-fuel giants currently lobbying to rebrand “wildfire season” as “extended tanning opportunity.” McIlroy’s stance has turned him into a geopolitical Rorschach test: in Washington he’s a “values-based leader,” in Riyadh he’s a “stubborn inconvenience,” and in Beijing he’s trending on Weibo as “that curly-haired guy who said no to the money.” The Chinese censors have not yet decided whether to delete him or offer him honorary citizenship for demonstrating the ancient Confucian virtue of telling obscene wealth to shove it.
Meanwhile, Europe watches with the weary amusement of a continent that invented colonialism, lost an empire, and now sells weekend city-breaks to the descendants of its former subjects. The DP World Tour (formerly the European Tour, formerly the “Let’s-Just-Be-Happy-If-It-Doesn’t-Rain Tour”) has clung to McIlroy like a lifeboat made of Titleists. Without him, their remaining star power is roughly equivalent to a regional Lithuanian boy band. With him, they can still pretend the Ryder Cup isn’t just an excuse for Americans and Europeans to get drunk and argue about whose currency is collapsing faster.
And then there’s Northern Ireland itself, that plucky province forever balanced between Guinness and gunpowder. Every McIlroy birdie is a temporary ceasefire; every missed putt, a reminder that peace accords don’t fix divots. When he tees it up in Portrush, the crowd doesn’t care whether he’s Protestant or Catholic; they only care that he’s theirs, and that he’s beating the English—an aspiration that unites more Irish hearts than any EU subsidy ever could.
Yet the clock ticks. The Saudis have already signed Brooks Koepka, who now looks like a man who’s discovered that apathy pays better than ambition. The Emiratis are building courses in the desert where the rough is made of reclaimed wastewater and the bunkers are, presumably, filled with the crushed dreams of migrant laborers. McIlroy’s principled stand may soon resemble Custer’s last—heroic, photogenic, and ultimately flattened by the weight of sovereign wealth funds that could buy the entire PGA, alphabet included.
Still, there’s something perversely uplifting about watching one man refuse to sell the last square inch of his integrity, even as the rest of the planet auctions itself off in bite-sized NFTs. If McIlroy wins another major, great—another bauble for the trophy case. If he doesn’t, he’ll still be the guy who looked the new world order in the eye and said, “Hard pass.” In 2024, that may be the rarest score of all.
