BE THE BIGGER MAN RORY
McIlroy should end playground squabble
GOLF is threatening to dissolve in an acidic vat of its own pettiness fed by the polluted stream of the sport’s civil war.
Rory McIlroy’s snubbing of Patrick Reed in the desert tee storm incident, coming hot on the heels of the birthday-gate ‘scandal’ involving Ian Poulter, casts the splintered game in an embarrassing light.
It is in danger of turning into a big kids’ playground squabble.
The LIV Golf revolution has brought money and innovation but it has simultaneously caused players on either side of the great divide to lose the plot.
If Poulter’s angry response to Ryder Cup Europe for their failure to wish him or his fellow LIV rebel Sergio Garcia a happy birthday was ridiculous, the McIlroy-Reed spat in Dubai elevated things to another level.
McIlroy is the good guy of golf, Reed the bad guy. Instinctively the vast majority of golf fans — whichever side of the Atlantic they are drawn from — would root for McIlroy.
For once though, McIlroy got it wrong in deliberately hanging Reed out to dry on the range.
Blanking
There have been plenty of occasions through Reed’s colourful career when a blanking was the least he deserved but this was not one of them. He had gone out of his way to shake hands with McIlroy and wish him a cordial — if belated — Happy New Year.
You might judge this two-faced given they occupy different positions on the golf barricades but he did so nonetheless. In coldshouldering Reed, McIlroy came across as the smaller man.
Reed’s description of him afterwards as an “immature little child” was over the top but it was not the World No.1’s finest moment.
Maybe he was miffed at being served a subpoena at his Florida home on Christmas Eve by LIV’s lawyers — who wouldn’t have been — but the crass timing was hardly Reed’s doing.
The unseasonal visit, requiring McIlroy’s attention, surrounded LIV’s anti-monopoly case against the PGA Tour, not anything brought by Reed in person.
He does have a separate defamation case running against the Golf Channel through the same lawyers, Larry Klayman, but that has nothing to do with McIlroy. However, for McIlroy, as the rallying point for the golf establishment, everything with LIV fingerprints has become the devil — and that includes players he would once have counted as friends.
Category
Reed might not fall into that category but there was once a mutual respect there.
Their on-course battles, including the classic Ryder Cup singles match at Hazeltine in 2016 when they were good-naturedly trading shushes and fist bumps were always played out in the right spirit.
And when Reed got into his rules scrapes, McIlroy tended to be one of the few players to defend him.
That has gone. When McIlroy was asked in Dubai whether he could see himself mending bridges with the American one day, the never-in-a-million-years face he made spoke eloquently.
He no longer has any relationship to speak of with Poulter, Garcia or Lee Westwood after they signed up with LIV.
This has become the fight of his life and in one sense his devotion to his cause is admirable.
But he might want to ask himself whether he is too invested and may be better served taking a step back.
Judgements on all sides are being clouded by emotion and the look for golf is a poor one.
‘This has become the fight of his life’