Rory McIlroy – Wouldn’t play LIV golf if it was the last option on earth

If Saudi Arabia’s PIF were doing well, Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy would have part-owned and lead teams in the LIV golf league once the PGA Tour and DP World Tour joined forces with the nearly $800 billion sovereign wealth fund.

It’s not as if McIlroy, the number three player in the world, is interested.

“If Live Golf was the last place on earth to play golf, I would retire. That’s how I feel about it,” McIlroy told reporters after the first round of the Scottish Open on Thursday. “I would play with the big leagues, but I would be very comfortable.”

The possibility of McIlroy and Woods owning the McIlroy and Woods teams was brought up by PIF consultants during a slideshow to PGA Tour Chairman Ed Herlihy and independent director Jimmy Dunne, two days after they met April 23-24 with PIF Governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan in London.

The slideshow was among the records released by the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which held a hearing on the proposed alliance on Tuesday.

A PGA Tour official told ESPN on Tuesday that the tour quickly rejected the idea of ​​McIlroy and Woods joining LIV Golf.

The records also included emails that indicated that McIlroy met with Al-Rumayyan in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in November. At the Canadian Open last month, McIlroy said he had previously played golf with Al-Rumayyan in a pro match in Dubai.

“I was with him at a random Formula 1 race a couple of years ago in Austin,” McIlroy said. “I saw him in Dubai at the end of last year. So he’s obviously been in and around the world of golf and obviously in the wider world of sport. He’s running in the same circles as a lot of the people I know.”