Rory McIlroy has thrown his weight behind Muirfield’s claim to stage The Open after more than a decade in exile over its previous stance on female members.
The 281-year-old club has been out in the cold since the vote in 2016 that somehow contrived to preserve the status quo of no women.
The so-called Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers finally reversed that stance a year later, but as of yet Open organisers have not said when their marquee event will return to the East Lothian links.
However, with The Open allocated to Birkdale this year and St Andrews in 2027, there is a glaring vacancy for 2028 and Muirfield will be in the reckoning for the first time since it hosted the championship in 2013. To those efforts, McIlroy’s endorsement might prove valuable.
Rory McIlroy says Muirfield deserves to be back on the Open rota after its exile
He said: ‘It would be wonderful if it was. I’m not privy to those conversations but Muirfield deserves to be back on the Open rota.
‘I would say at Muirfield, they rectified the issues that they had. It’s a wonderful golf course. It’s one of the best courses on the rota and in the UK. As well, it has to commercially make sense. I think Mark Darbon (chief executive of the R&A, which organises The Open) has been brought in to make The Open commercially viable.
‘I would say Muirfield, that area, North Berwick, that would probably be one of the more commercially viable opens.’
It wasn’t lost on McIlroy that Muirfield was the location of one of his worst golfing moments, given he carded 79 and 75 there on his way to missing the cut 13 years ago. ‘It could have been my lowest point,’ he said on Saturday.
That career has at least blossomed in the subsequent years, but there will surely be no victory at the Dubai Desert Classic.
The world No 2 will commence his final round on Sunday a full 11 shots off the lead after a 71 that was rounded off with a missed putt from two feet. Perhaps compounding the frustration is that his old nemesis, Patrick Reed, is setting the pace on 14 under par, four clear of his fellow LIV rebel David Puig. Encouragingly, Viktor Hovland is one further back after a 65 despite his incessant fiddling with his swing.
Such is the rust in McIlroy’s game he believes it is more likely we will witness a Manchester United win away at Arsenal on Sunday than a comeback.
‘And that’s from a very pessimistic United fan,’ he said. It really has been that kind of week.
None of McIlroy’s game has been egregiously bad, but the issue is that none of it has been especially good either, plonking him at three under par and someway short of the kind of placings with which to make a late assault. The experiment to switch from bladed irons to the forgiving cavity backs more often found in the hands of hackers is evidently yet to pay off.
‘It’s January,’ he said. ‘I am sort of working my way back into form a little bit. It’s okay. It’s not exactly where I want it to be but it’s early.’
After missing three of the first four fairways and parring the entirety of the front nine, McIlroy didn’t card a birdie until the 10th. An approach into the water limited him to a par at the gettable par-five 13th, but a four-foot birdie on the 15th improved the outlook before a moment of carelessness stung the Northern Irishman at the last. It will likely prove academic in any case.
With such loose form, there will be no showdown on the stretch with Reed. For those who enjoy the drama of their meetings, that’s a great shame – it was at the Emirates Golf Club in 2023 when they had their strangest tiff, with McIlroy snubbing the LIV rebel on the range and Reed responding by chucking a tee back at him. And thus, tee-gate was born.
Reed joked to a handful of us on Friday that he would attempt to ‘break the ice’ with McIlroy by inviting him to throw one back at him. Based on how far ahead Reed finds himself, he is presumably out of McIlroy’s range.
