Rory McIlroy plays a shot on the second hole during a practice round prior to the U.S. Open at Pinehurst Resort in Pinehurst, N.C., on June 12.Ross Kinnaird/Getty Images
It has been a weird couple of months for Rory McIlroy.
Going into the season, he was the champion of ethical golf. Then a rumour started that he had turned coat and would join LIV. Rather than not do the thing he had never said he would, McIlroy felt the need to deny he’d ever considered it.
The problem with refuting such things is that doing so gives them substance. Nothing had changed, but McIlroy’s last-upright-man reputation took a hit.
Soon thereafter, he did something a lot of professional athletes do do – he filed for divorce.
McIlroy had been burned in his 20s by having too public a romance, with tennis player Caroline Wozniacki. Their engagement ended poorly. McIlroy was portrayed as a bit of a cad.
Now that he was breaking up with his wife, his communications team started putting out statements about how little he wanted to talk about it. Why confirm it at all? Whose business could it possibly be?
For a month, the story cycled around the golf world. After a friendly interview with a CBS reporter at the PGA Championship, the internet decided that McIlroy must be having an affair. For a couple of weeks, that rumour dominated the stupidest levels of the sports discussion.
Now, just as we are about to start the U.S. Open, the hardest working comms team in show biz has announced the divorce is off. McIlroy and his wife have been reconciled.
Once again, a statement was released: “Over the past weeks, Erica and I have realized that our best future was as a family together. Thankfully, we have resolved our differences and look forward to a new beginning.”
“Best future?” “A new beginning?” Who talks this way? Maybe some future chatbot will be better at sounding human than the humans who currently work in communications. And maybe they’ll be more clever about when and how to respond to every little thing that happens.
It wasn’t so long ago that the totality of a player’s personal life was off limits to the mainstream media. Tittle tattle about what a guy gets up to in his off hours is eternal. But in the same way you would not send out an All Employees e-mail about what you just heard about that guy in Business Development, it was not published.
That has changed so fast, and so completely, that there was never much of a conversation about the wisdom or propriety of it.
Tiger Woods was one of the first to feel the full boomerang effect of revealing too much. When he took up with his first wife, Elin Nordegren, it was fairy tale stuff. Reporters were all over it in a way they would not have been a generation earlier, because back then Woods’s platoon of trained media killers at Nike would not have allowed it.
But Woods wanted the publicity. It was good for the brand. His perfect marriage became as much a part of his mystique as his victories.
So when things came apart, nobody wanted to hear the old ‘in this difficult time please respect our …’ and so on and so forth.
The coverage of Woods’s fall would have dismayed the media, sporting or otherwise, of the 1980s and 1990s. But that’s back when we agreed people’s private lives were their own concern.
Now everybody with a little clout advertises every single thing that’s ever happened to them. This has freed the media to come down on them like weather once things go wrong.
These personal catastrophes are usually played out in statements – making them, releasing them, denying them. None of it is edifying. It’s usually just sad and/or sordid.
That’s part of why it was such a thrill when Naomi Osaka announced that she would no longer do news conferences. That could have been the start of a great silence in sports. How many times and in how many ways can the winner say they were really feeling it today, while the loser says they just didn’t have it? It’s pointless.
Osaka’s mistake was framing her intention as a principled stand for mental health. That prompted a follow-up discussion that Osaka felt compelled to be part of, rather undermining her original position. Now that she’s back and no longer as big a deal, she seems happy to talk.
A better way to have gone about it would have been to stop talking, and not talk about why you aren’t talking.
Not everybody understands a multimillionaire athlete feeling bad for themselves, but they do get someone who doesn’t like other people in their business. That used to be our north star for a well-developed person.
I wait in faint hope for this yet-to-be-discovered non-voice of a generation – the one who never says anything to anyone. One who never Instagrams, or does activations, or feels the need to weigh in on foreign wars, or advertises. One who just plays and goes home.
The French have a saying, “Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés” – to live happily, live hidden.
We have yet to meet the Thomas Pynchon of the links who has figured this out.
Until then, we remain in the thrall of the oversharing pro, and the communications-amplification apparatus built up around them.
Is it good for business? It’s good for visibility, though that’s not the same thing. I suspect people would be drawn to a great pro who never speaks, if only for the mystery.
I feel more certain that fans and media would ruin it by truffling around in that remarkable person’s private life until they were driven either wild or out of the game.
So for now, there is only the way of TMI. The way of divorce announcements, reconciliation statements, public apologies, letters of protest and having a thought on everything, including especially those things that have nothing to do with you.
As long as it remains this way, the only announcement capable of producing shock is the one that goes unissued, and the only interesting statement is one that is unmade.