Two of the best players each from LIV Golf versus the PGA Tour in a televised match might just show fans that an effort is being made to repair a divided sport, Rory McIlroy said Wednesday.
McIlroy will have Scottie Scheffler as his partner in Tuesday’s 18-hole match against Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka in the Crypto.com Showdown at Shadow Creek north of Las Vegas.
Except for the four majors, it will be their only time competing together all year. McIlroy doesn’t count playing with Koepka in a member-member outing at The Grove last weekend.
“We’re trying to bring these players together, and the most opportunities we can get to do that, the better,” McIlroy said. “Does it remind people we’re not playing together all the time? Yes. But at least we’re making the effort to try to bring the best together more often. If we can start by doing something like this, that’s only a good thing.”
He added later: “It was really about us saying we’re going take this into our own hands a little bit, and we’re going to do something outside either tour, not to give something back to the fans but to … let them know that we’re trying to provide entertainment, that the players want to play together more often.”
Koepka said he expected some Ryder Cup-styled vibes, and DeChambeau hinted at something “bigger and badder” for next year with greater alignment.
“With the way the whole golf landscape works, I’m still unsure of when we’ll get together a little more often,” McIlroy said of the two tours. “The idea is to bring the best of both tours together in a match that people could get behind and get excited about it.”
McIlroy is on the transaction committee for PGA Tour Enterprises that has been negotiating with the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia — the financial muscle behind LIV — on becoming a minority investor.
Still uncertain is what kind of schedule — LIV has shown no signs of going away — would allow for players from both circuits playing more often outside the majors.
“We’d like to see everybody back together,” Scheffler said. “There’s been so much talk about LIV versus the PGA Tour, all this talk about money. We want to get back to the competition. … It’s fund to get together to compete.”
The PGA Tour granted releases for McIlroy and Scheffler to play at Shadow Creek, with McIlroy saying that “it took a few conversations to get them to the point where they saw this could be a good thing in the long run.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.