Joe Callaghan reports from Toronto 

IT WAS 6.53AM when Rory McIlroy stepped out of a shuttle vehicle and skipped up a few steps to the elevated 10th tee at Oakdale Golf and Country Club in Toronto’s northern fringes.

After some quiet introductions with his Wednesday morning playing partners and not much of a stretch, he pierced the waking quiet and striped an iron down the middle of the short par four then waited for the others to hopefully do something remotely similar.

Instead, two of those wealthy enough to have bought a spot in the Pro Am alongside the Canadian Open’s defending and beloved champion showed that maybe they should have spent a bit on some coaching or sport psychology sessions too. Two of the quartet skewed tee shots out of bounds but hey, they could be forgiven. Nerves were still frayed, still jangling after a seismic Monday for the sport, even if McIlroy was doing a good job of hiding it.

When he climbed up to the 10th green, perched high on a hill, McIlroy pulled out the putter and stood there for a minute. A smouldery Fanta sun tried to pour Vitamin D down on him but smoke and smog was blocking the good stuff out. Wildfires across Canada have turned early summer skies into something foreboding, something to be feared rather than cherished after an endless winter. So McIlroy got on with it…and that would be the order of the day.

In spite of all we’ve seen these past few years, sportswashing had never felt quite as inevitable or irreversible as the climate change that is sparking the fires and polluting Canada’s skies. That was until the past 24 hours arrived.

Once he’d wrapped up his nine holes of Pro Am pleasantry, McIlroy’s public reckoning with Monday’s machinations made for a much less pleasurable spectacle. He raged against the dying of the light but just a little and not for long. Pressed on the PGA tour’s embrace of Saudi blood and oil and influence, the very stuff he had railed against so consistently and impressively since early last year, McIlroy finally yielded.

“It’s hard for me to not sit up here and feel somewhat like a sacrificial lamb and feeling like I’ve put myself out there and this is what happens,” he said. “Removing myself from the situation, I see how this is better for the game of golf, there’s no denying it.”
He used those same five words — “removing myself from the situation” — on at least three occasions. Allied with his body language which suggested he would very much like to have removed himself physically from this situation, it begged the question as to what his truest feelings were, whether the Saudis bringing golf to heel didn’t sit well with him at all. So we asked it — and got a truly grim response.

“I’ve come to terms with it. I see what’s happened in other sports. I see what’s happened in other businesses,” he said, the Saudi assaults on football, Formula One, boxing and plenty more having been referenced. “And, honestly, I’ve just resigned myself to the fact that this is, you know, this is what’s going to happen. It’s very hard to keep up with people that have more money than anyone else…that’s sorta where my head’s at.”

What a place. What a place for McIlroy’s head, one filled with informed, rigorous argument and righteous anger this past 18 months as he called LIV Golf and its rebels to account time and again, to now be.

McIlroy moves in plenty of stratospheric business circles. He was particularly jokey and familiar with one of his playing partners Wednesday, Dave McKay, the CEO of Canadian Open sponsors RBC, a man whose firm controls over $1 trillion in assets. He knows how the world and especially its money works. And he had clearly believed that he was on the right side of golf’s war until he found there were no sides any more. There was the Saudis or nothing. So the Saudis it will be.

“Whether you like it or not, the PIF were going to keep spending the money in golf,” he added. “So if you’re thinking about one of the biggest sovereign wealth funds in the world, would you rather have them as a partner or an enemy? At the end of the day, money talks and you would rather have them as a partner.”

He did admittedly find time for some last flashes of fight and bite. “I still hate LIV. Like, I hate LIV. I hope it goes away,” he said. “And I would fully expect that it does. That’s where the distinction here is. This is the PGA TOUR, the DP World Tour and the PIF. Very different from LIV.”

Parts of that argument may have been technically true yet LIV was mentioned over eight times in Tuesday’s bombshell announcement. In any case, LIV was just a terrible, ad agency-inspired name for what was a Saudi Trojan Horse, one which worked a treat.

There’ll be more to come. A whole stable full. Karim Benzema was saddling up another just as golf’s new reality dawned. Under Wednesday’s smoke-filled skies here, McIlroy’s quiet acceptance of it all only made things depressingly clearer.