Column | Tiffany Chan, not Rory McIlroy, is the type of player golf in the Olympics should be all about
While top men simply can’t be bothered – sorry, ‘are worried about Zika’ – women and amateurs are relishing chance to play on global stage
Here’s a quote from a top golfer about possibly pulling out of the Olympics: “If I had ... it would have been a very selfish decision. It would have been an easy way out for me but I thought about the good of golf. This is the first time golf has been in the Olympics for a long time and if the best players aren’t there, supporting the event and competing in it, then what’s the point? I feel like I have a responsibility to grow the game.”
Have you guessed? That was Rory McIlroy in 2014, when the biggest controversy regarding his participation in the Olympics was whether he would represent Great Britain or Ireland. Some suggested he might pull out to avoid having to choose. He continued: “[Pulling out] was an option, but it was never an option that I would have taken.”
Here’s another quote from McIlroy, from this week after he, er, pulled out of the Olympics: “I didn’t get into golf to try and grow the game,” he said. “I got into golf to win major championships.”
Finally an attack of honesty. When McIlroy pulled out on June 22 he blamed the Zika virus. “My family’s health comes before anything else.” Who can argue with that? Certainly not the rest of the world’s top four players, Jason Day, Jordan Spieth and Dustin Johnson, who all followed McIlroy’s lead in the following days, citing the same convenient Zika excuse.
While Spieth was still prevaricating and looking for sympathy on the eve of the British Open, McIlroy had finally had enough. It’s perhaps the first time anyone’s been honest about this Olympics tournament since it was announced in 2009. “It was seven years of trying to give the politically correct answer and finally I just cracked,” he admitted.
For most of the world’s best players, and many of the world’s quite-good-to-mediocre players, this is a pointless, unnecessary addition to an already cluttered calendar. Twenty-one have pulled out at the time of writing and the Strength of Field – a rankings-based measurement of a tournament’s quality – is considerably less than the John Deere Classic which takes place the same weekend, but has US$4.8 million in prize money compared to roughly US$0.0 million for the Olympics.