Nature’s gentlemen with knobs on: Rory McIlroy and Marty Whelan
RORY McIlroy’s recent remarks about his objections to a proposed Premier League of golf, partly on the grounds that the money was coming from Saudi Arabia, were extraordinary.
Indeed last year he allegedly turned down $2.5m to play in a tour event in Saudi, saying that “there’s a morality to it”. Which was also extraordinary.
The ordinary thing for almost all the top golfers in the world, is to gorge themselves on the largesse of Corporate America, and everything else of a corporate nature. In so doing, they align themselves effortlessly with the culture of the right, though they would fiercely assert that they are apolitical.
That they just want to play golf — which they’d usually be doing at the Masters in Augusta in a few weeks’ time, an event at which almost no black people are ever seen by TV viewers.
Ah, but to mention that would be “political”, whereas the effective exclusion of African-Americans (except in the role of security men) is apparently not “political” at all — it’s just nature taking its course.
Golfers, of all sports people, might be expected to take a view on such situations — when it comes to getting invitations from dodgy regimes, the top players are so rich, they sure as hell don’t need the money.
Which should set them free, as free as Rory McIlroy declining $2.5m of the Saudi’s filthy lucre. Yet it doesn’t, for the most part.
So it was a big thing for Rory to do, breaking with the ancient customs of his tribe.
Good on him.
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I think I have a superpower.
It is not perhaps the most useful superpower that you might have at a time like this — and I’m not sure how useful it is, even to me.
But it goes something like this: when I switch on the Marty Whelan show on Lyric FM, and there’s a piece of music playing, I know straight away whether Marty is manning the decks that day, or whether it is one of those rare days when he is replaced by a substitute.
I just know…
The music itself will not be much different, it may be a light classical piece that Marty too must play along with the good stuff — on the face of it, there’s no difference in the sound coming out of the radio. And yet I know…
I just know that there is something different about it, some other energy that is not Marty’s. I can sense the absence of his great spirit, somehow. And invariably, it turns out that I am right.
I don’t know how I do it — but nor do I know how he does it.