Rory McIlroy has been a vocal critic of the LIV Golf breakaway league, but has softened his stance in recent times as the PGA Tour and LIV continue to discuss a merger.
Rory McIlroy details impact of PGA Tour-LIV Golf merger on mental health issues
Rory McIlroy has opened up about how the fight between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf affected his mental health. He’s spoken up on how tough it was being thrust into the forefront of the conflict.
McIlroy became the face of the PGA Tour after LIV Golf started in 2022. He didn’t like the new league funded by Saudi Arabia and spoke out against its boss, Greg Norman, and the players who joined.
But now, McIlroy feels less stressed about it all. He felt like he was the one everyone looked at when they said last summer that the PGA Tour and LIV Golf might work together.
He’s decided to stop being a PGA Tour player director so he can just play golf, while the two tours are still talking about joining forces. On the I Can Fly Podcast, he shared that if he hadn’t learned to be thick-skinned, the whole thing would have been even harder on him.
My mental health was probably challenged quite a bit over the past couple of years,” he shared. “I’ve always prided myself on being quite a resilient person. I think I was much more thin-skinned earlier in my career and I think I’ve learned to get a bit tougher in that way.
“I think if I was thin-skinned, I wouldn’t have put myself out there and been as outspoken as I was because I wouldn’t have been able to handle what came my way.
“Someone said to me a lot of the time, it’s the hard thing to do the right thing and that’s the way my parents raised me and that’s the way I’ve tried to live my life. You want to do the right thing, but most of the time the right thing is also the hard thing.
Even though McIlroy has been less critical of LIV recently, he remains committed to the PGA Tour and insists he wouldn’t have done anything differently, even with hindsight.
He explained: “As much as you want to or try to have everyone in this world like you, it’s not going to happen. It’s completely impossible. Once I realised that and thought not everyone is going to like me anyway, I think I became much more comfortable with who I was as a person, and when you become comfortable with yourself, you can be a bit more outspoken and say things that p*** people off.”
But at the end of the day, as long as you have the love from the people that are closest to you, it doesn’t really matter what anyone else says and that’s the approach that I have taken to the last two years. Has it hurt some relationships along the way? Absolutely, but time is a great healer and I was speaking up for what I believed in and I would do the same thing all over again.”
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