THE TWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS
Rory reminds Twitter critic he has £200 million in the bank at tender age of 28!
US OPEN LATEST
Hours after the world No.2 left Erin Hills at the half way stage, serial motormouth and one-hit wonder Major winner Steve Elkington took to Twitter to question Mcilroy’s hunger for success.
His outburst: “Rory is so bored playing golf...without Tiger the threshold is prolly 4 majors with 100mill in bank,” earned a quick response from Mcilroy with a screen grab of his Major winning record.
Above it, Mcilroy tweeted: “More like 200mil... not bad for a ‘bored’ 28 year old... plenty more where that came from.”
Unashamed, Elkington hit back with two different tweets – the first of which tried to justify his point.
He wrote: “Nobody more gifted than Rory... He’s so bored playing golf on tour.”
The second in direct reply to Mcilroy’s “More like 200mil” response only earned him a spelling lesson from the Northern Irishman.
Elkington said: “New you were a money guy. Jack (Nicklaus) won 18 and never mentioned his total cash.. It was 5 mill.”
To which Mcilroy hit back: “That’s why Jack designed 100’s of golf courses... and it’s knew... mustn’t have taught grammar in the 50’s...”
Mcilroy didn’t miss his target, unlike repeated occasions during his two rounds at Erin Hills when he missed the cut by four shots with a score of five over par.
But Elkington was undoubtedly the one ruled out of bounds with his latest instance of courting controvesy.
During the 2013 Senior Open at Royal Birkdale, Elkington was fined by the European Tour for offensive racist outbursts on Twitter. The 1995 USPGA champion was forced to apologise after tweeting: “Things about Southport ... fat tattooed guy, fat tattooed girl, trash, Pakistani robber guy, sh** food.”
He then followed it up on Sat- urday by adding: “Couple caddies got rolled by some Pakkis, bad night for them.”
At Erin Hills today English duo Paul Casey and Tommy Fleetwood will go into the third round in a four-way tie for the lead alongside Americans Brooks Koepka and Brian Harman.
The quartet are locked on seven under par at the top of a packed leader-board with a whopping total of 23 players within four shots of each other.
Martin Laird is the solo Scottish survivor for the weekend after Richie Ramsay narrowly missed the cut by one shot and Russell Knox was gutted to fall well short on five over par.
Laird, one under par, tees off at 4.19pm UK time in the company of American Ryder Cup hero Patrick Reed.