SHANE McGRATH
Rory knows his place
ONE line in his explanation for choosing to represent Ireland at next year’s Olympics revealed the complexities of Rory McIlroy’s identity. McIlroy said he had ‘wrestled’ with the topic before making his call.
‘And the decision was I’m going to play golf for the country or the nation that I’ve always played golf for.’
That is Ireland, but in referring to it as ‘the country or the nation’, McIlroy inadvertently highlighted the fraught nature of identity in Northern Ireland.
If he called Ireland a country, then one body of critics could accuse him of neglecting the British part of his identity.
The word ‘nation’ has a looser meaning, in one definition explained as an ‘imagined community’.
That could be vague enough to keep both sides of the argument about McIlroy’s identity guessing – and that is probably the best he can hope for now.
Whether he is Irish or British should be nobody’s concern but Rory McIlroy’s, of course, but the matter of claiming him for one of the communities in Northern Ireland means he is often left a bystander as others tussle over him.
This argument is frequently toxic, and it has burned with the stubbornness of a gorse fire since at least 2012.
It was that year, in an interview with the Daily Mail, that McIlroy ventured the view that he felt more British than Irish.
That drew predictable poison from many on this side of the border, and beyond the online nonsense, there was in more polite circles, too, a hostility to his comments.
Two years later, he said he would play for Ireland at the 2016 Olympics, and the news was met triumphantly here.
Those previously appalled at the notion of a man feeling more closely connected to one part of his identity now had no problem with it.
The manner in which McIlroy and other leading golfers – including, it must be said, Shane Lowry – handled the Zika virus scare ahead of Rio was clumsy.
And when McIlroy, like most of his peers, withdrew, prejudice sluiced through the debate once more.
McIlroy and his relationship with Ireland has never been straightforward, as his decision to skip the Irish Open this year showed.
He was excoriated for what was a logistical call, one that seemed reasonable when he explained it.
It was depicted as a betrayal in some quarters, as if he was letting down a tournament whose very survival as a meaningful event on the European Tour was down in large part to his support.
Given all that, McIlroy could be excused from swerving clear of any subject that would lead him back across the treacherous terrain of Irish identity.
He hasn’t, and he should be commended for it.
It’s another example of his honesty, of his determination to do what he believes is right for him, irrespective of the controversy that might ensue. This is not a call he has made so he can wrap the green flag around him. Rather, he wants to be an Olympian.
And in pursuing that, he is, as he explained, doing what he did throughout his golfing life and representing Ireland. The game is governed on an all-island basis in Ireland, through the Golfing Union of Ireland.
And as with the IRFU, an organisation that can manage to harness sporting excellence to best practical effect despite the obstacles left strewn by history, deserves the admiration of the very many uninterested in petrified ideas of identity.
This issue cannot be fully probed without raising important objections to the presence of golf in the Olympics in the first place.
This is not about
McIlroy or any other superstar, but rather the absurdity of the sport’s inclusion in the Games. In athletics, swimming and amateur boxing, an Olympic medal is the physical representation of a lifetime’s effort. It is the target that lights up pitchblack mornings, the lure that pulls swimmers through endless lonely lengths, the north star by which a million painful miles are tracked.
In these sports, there is no greater glory than an Olympic medal.
And that remains true even in an age when the reputation of the Games has been deservedly battered.
But an Olympic podium is not the pinnacle in golf, which has its own hierarchy of achievement in the majors.
So it goes, too, for soccer and tennis, other major sports with no business being included on an Olympics roster.
That is not deterring McIlroy. And, to his credit, nor is the knowledge that in daring to assert his identity, he is reopening a controversy that has proven torrid in the past.