Rory McIlroy left PGA Tour players’ text chain after Jordan Spieth’s LIV Golf remarks

Rory McIlroy “removed himself” from a PGA Tour players’ group chat in the wake of comments made by Jordan Spieth over the proposed merger with the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund (PIF). Spieth replaced McIlroy on the PGA Tour Policy Board in November when the Northern Irishman quit amid frustrations with tour leadership, plus a desire to spend more time with his family and work on his game. Spieth also had his hand in a decision to prevent McIlroy from rejoining the policy board.

The policy board has been at the forefront of the tour’s negotiations with PIF, which bankrolls the breakaway LIV Golf. PIF and the PGA Tour struck a framework agreement for a merger 11 months ago that would reunify professional golf, but there has been little progress since.

McIlroy was eager to return to the top table following a request from 2012 US Open champion Webb Simpson, who wanted to resign his role as a player director if he could select McIlroy as his replacement. But the Ulsterman confirmed on Wednesday he will not be rejoining the policy board.

“I think it got pretty complicated and pretty messy, and I think with the way it happened, I think it opened up some old wounds and scar tissue from things that have happened before,” McIlroy said. “There was a subset of people on the board that were maybe uncomfortable with me coming back on for some reason.”

McIlroy did not name names, but it is understood that Spieth, Patrick Cantlay and Tiger Woods – despite their many years of friendship – were not keen on the world number two returning to the board.

Cantlay and McIlroy’s discord in the past has been well-documented, with the infamous Ryder Cup incident and a subsequent interview with the Irish Independent when McIlroy said their relationship is “average at best”, adding: “[We] don’t have a ton in common and see the world quite differently.”

Woods and McIlroy’s close bond, meanwhile, has become strained under the weight of the PGA Tour-LIV Golf rivalry, with the pair having a “falling out of sorts”. McIlroy and Spieth have had their issues, too. The pair were grouped with Viktor Hovland for the opening round of the Players Championship in March, and it proved to be an eventful round with intense clashes over two drops that McIlroy took when his tee shots found the water.

A month before that episode, McIlroy did not approve of Spieth’s comments when the American said the PGA Tour did not “need” to go into business with the PIF after a £2.4 billion deal was agreed with Strategic Sports Group (SSG). Half of that money has already been doled out to PGA Tour members as part of an equity scheme.

Spieth added: “I think the positive [of a deal with PIF] would be a unification [of PGA Tour and LIV players], but I just think it’s something that is almost not even worth talking about right this second,” said Spieth, who assumed a seat on the board vacated late last year by Rory McIlroy. “The idea is that we have a strategic partner that allows the PGA Tour to go forward the way that it’s operating right now without anything else.”

McIlroy believed the comments were unhelpful to negotiations over a deal that could see the stars of the PGA Tour and LIV Golf play together more often. So much so that McIlroy was minded to leave a text chain of PGA Tour players in response. According to Golf Digest, the pair had an hour-long chat afterwards to clear the air.

McIlroy said of Spieth’s comments at the time: “My thing was if I’m the original [potential] investor that thought that they were going to get this deal done back in July, and I’m hearing a board member say that we don’t really need them now, how are they going to think about that, what are they going to feel about that?

“They are still sitting out there with hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions, that they’re going to pour it into sport. And I know what Jordan was saying. But if I were PIF and I was hearing that coming from here, the day after doing this SSG deal, it wouldn’t have made me too happy, I guess?”