McIlroy, however, reiterated his lingering opposition to LIV Golf, saying: “I hate LIV. Like, I hope it goes away.”
Updated 3:27 p.m. ET
Rory McIlroy is still seething, still edgy, still eager to bludgeon LIV Golf, the Saudi-backed league that he has spent much of the past year denigrating as a compromised interloper.
“I hate LIV,” McIlroy, one of the new circuit’s most fearsome critics, said on Wednesday. “Like, I hope it goes away, and I would fully expect that it does.”
He also appears begrudgingly accepting of what PGA Tour executives believe is reality, bruising and humbling as it might be: that the surest way to defang LIV is through a partnership that positions the tour to collect the kind of Saudi money it has denounced.