LAST YEAR TOM McKibbin birdied the final hole of the final event of the DP World Tour season to grab the final PGA Tour card on offer for 2025, and having achieved his dream, McKibbin he has now found eight million reasons not to go and live it.
There are strong reports this week that McKibbin is about to sign an $8 million deal with LIV to fill the vacant spot on Jon Rahm’s Legion XIII team, and so throw his lot in with the Saudi-backed tour.
Zimbabwe’s Kieran Vincent played badly enough last year to be relegated and thus vacate a spot on Rahm’s team, and McKibbin offered a no comment to Golf Digest earlier today when asked about the rumours. His management team has also taken a vow of silence in response to media requests on the subject.
We have seen this movie before, and it usually ends with the protagonist riding into the Sunset Tour with bags of cash.
McKibbin’s decision is another little blow to pro golf’s credibility as a sport worth caring about, and it is indicative of its presently debased state that the question generally asked has been not why is McKibbin doing this, but why wouldn’t he?
If he joins LIV, McKibbin will forego his PGA Tour card along with any hopes of playing in the next Ryder Cup, all the while making it extremely difficult to play his way into any of the majors.
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McKibbin has not worked his way sufficiently into the national consciousness for this to be met with the full, is nothing sacred shriek. Instead, the general reaction among Irish golf fans were a couple of raised eyebrows followed by a shallow kind of sigh. We’re in not-angry-but-disappointed territory.
McKibbin’s rise was a neat tale: the precocious kid from the same club as Rory McIlroy who grew up aiming to emulate his hero. In an interview with The 42 at the start oflast year, McKibbin said he had not been offered nor sought a deal with LIV, but was instead focused on playing his way onto the PGA Tour.
He also made plain his gratitude to McIlroy. “He has been great with me,” said McKibbin. “I’ve spent a lot of time with him over the last seven or eight years, and I’ve played a lot of golf with him.” McKibbin has evidently decided he’s played enough golf with McIlroy for a while.
The pair ended the DP World Tour finale event locked in an embrace, as a victorious McIlroy briefly swapped his own tearful emotion for a sheer kind of pride once McKibbin told him he was bound for the PGA Tour.
Tom McKibbin tells Rory McIlroy that he'll be joining him on the PGA TOUR 🥹
That moment with McIlroy has now been irredeemably cheapened.
But, hey, the Saudis pay a lot of money to make things look cheap.
As Gary Murphy speculated on Off the Ball, McKibbin may simply be acting like the smartest guy in the room.
LIV has existed in obscurity to now, but is now said to be close to making a splash into the mainstream with a broadcast deal with Fox in the US. It can also be said to have more political influence in the States nowadays than the PGA Tour, with a LIV event in April slated to be held at Donald Trump’s course in Doral.
Plus, joining LIV is no longer ruinous to one’s public reputation. We are long passed the era in which LIV players were met with a righteous kind of scorn for choosing the Saudi millions: that was doled out to the early defectors, such as Graeme McDowell, who can now have some justifiable complaint for being used as one of the operation’s early-days mudguards.
Players are not so easily dismissed in those terms now: Bryson DeChambeau has completely rehabilitated his public image, and Jon Rahm’s move was met by talk that the Ryder Cup rules should be amended to allow him compete at Bethpage, rather than allow him ostracised in the same manner as Sergio Garcia, Lee Westwood and Ian Poulter.
The golf media, it seems, has lost the will to ask LIV golfers about human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia. That may partly be down to the fact that the PGA Tour has made it clear they don’t care about all that nasty business, not when there’s money to be made. The 2023 merger agreement was proof that the Tour would sooner hold its nose than any kind of principle.
So if the whole sport is ultimately willing to do a deal with the Saudis, it seems harsh to pick on any single player for wishing to do one of their own. Golf is a stickler for its rules, and Tom McKibbin can say he is merely playing by them, grubby as they may be.
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McKibbin's LIV deal is disappointing - but who can blame him?
LAST YEAR TOM McKibbin birdied the final hole of the final event of the DP World Tour season to grab the final PGA Tour card on offer for 2025, and having achieved his dream, McKibbin he has now found eight million reasons not to go and live it.
There are strong reports this week that McKibbin is about to sign an $8 million deal with LIV to fill the vacant spot on Jon Rahm’s Legion XIII team, and so throw his lot in with the Saudi-backed tour.
Zimbabwe’s Kieran Vincent played badly enough last year to be relegated and thus vacate a spot on Rahm’s team, and McKibbin offered a no comment to Golf Digest earlier today when asked about the rumours. His management team has also taken a vow of silence in response to media requests on the subject.
We have seen this movie before, and it usually ends with the protagonist riding into the Sunset Tour with bags of cash.
McKibbin’s decision is another little blow to pro golf’s credibility as a sport worth caring about, and it is indicative of its presently debased state that the question generally asked has been not why is McKibbin doing this, but why wouldn’t he?
If he joins LIV, McKibbin will forego his PGA Tour card along with any hopes of playing in the next Ryder Cup, all the while making it extremely difficult to play his way into any of the majors.
McKibbin has not worked his way sufficiently into the national consciousness for this to be met with the full, is nothing sacred shriek. Instead, the general reaction among Irish golf fans were a couple of raised eyebrows followed by a shallow kind of sigh. We’re in not-angry-but-disappointed territory.
McKibbin’s rise was a neat tale: the precocious kid from the same club as Rory McIlroy who grew up aiming to emulate his hero. In an interview with The 42 at the start of last year, McKibbin said he had not been offered nor sought a deal with LIV, but was instead focused on playing his way onto the PGA Tour.
He also made plain his gratitude to McIlroy. “He has been great with me,” said McKibbin. “I’ve spent a lot of time with him over the last seven or eight years, and I’ve played a lot of golf with him.” McKibbin has evidently decided he’s played enough golf with McIlroy for a while.
The pair ended the DP World Tour finale event locked in an embrace, as a victorious McIlroy briefly swapped his own tearful emotion for a sheer kind of pride once McKibbin told him he was bound for the PGA Tour.
That moment with McIlroy has now been irredeemably cheapened.
But, hey, the Saudis pay a lot of money to make things look cheap.
As Gary Murphy speculated on Off the Ball, McKibbin may simply be acting like the smartest guy in the room.
LIV has existed in obscurity to now, but is now said to be close to making a splash into the mainstream with a broadcast deal with Fox in the US. It can also be said to have more political influence in the States nowadays than the PGA Tour, with a LIV event in April slated to be held at Donald Trump’s course in Doral.
Plus, joining LIV is no longer ruinous to one’s public reputation. We are long passed the era in which LIV players were met with a righteous kind of scorn for choosing the Saudi millions: that was doled out to the early defectors, such as Graeme McDowell, who can now have some justifiable complaint for being used as one of the operation’s early-days mudguards.
Players are not so easily dismissed in those terms now: Bryson DeChambeau has completely rehabilitated his public image, and Jon Rahm’s move was met by talk that the Ryder Cup rules should be amended to allow him compete at Bethpage, rather than allow him ostracised in the same manner as Sergio Garcia, Lee Westwood and Ian Poulter.
The golf media, it seems, has lost the will to ask LIV golfers about human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia. That may partly be down to the fact that the PGA Tour has made it clear they don’t care about all that nasty business, not when there’s money to be made. The 2023 merger agreement was proof that the Tour would sooner hold its nose than any kind of principle.
So if the whole sport is ultimately willing to do a deal with the Saudis, it seems harsh to pick on any single player for wishing to do one of their own. Golf is a stickler for its rules, and Tom McKibbin can say he is merely playing by them, grubby as they may be.
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