Rory McIlroy turned down chance to be Ryder Cup playing captain

New York Times

10 hours ago

Rory McIlroy has spent much of the last decade as the emotional leader and constant on Europe's Ryder Cup teams, making his future as a captain an inevitability. He said on Wednesday, however, that it will not be until he's done as a player.
'The idea of me being a playing captain sometime soon has come up, and I've shot it down straight away,' McIlroy told reporters at the BMW Championship outside of Baltimore. 'I don't think you can do it.'
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While McIlroy did not specify what 'sometime soon' means, the 2027 Ryder Cup is headed to Ireland, not far from the 36-year-old's boyhood home in Northern Ireland.
Current European captain Luke Donald is already repeating his captaincy after the 2023 success, but there's no obvious successor. The United States faced this situation after Marco Simone and thought outside the box, going with Keegan Bradley.
It's created a dominant storyline for the U.S. team, as Bradley sits 10th in the current Ryder Cup standings and faces the quandary of whether or not to pick himself to play. He would be the first playing captain since Arnold Palmer.
'I definitely think he's one of the best 12 American players right now. That's why everyone is so interested, and it's such a compelling case, and it's going to be— I'm just as interested as everyone else to see how it all plays out,' McIlroy said.
The Ryder Cup has undergone dramatic changes since Palmer's days, becoming one of the most significant events on the golf calendar, with massive crowds and intense media attention. The captain operates as a head coach of sorts, leading his team throughout the week, while also serving as the public face of the team.
'You think about the extra media that a captain has to do, you think about the extra meetings that the captains have to do with the vice captains, with the PGA of America, in Keegan's case, preparing your speech for the opening ceremony. There's a lot of things that people don't see that the captain does the week of the Ryder Cup, especially now that the Ryder Cup has become so big,' McIlroy said. 'If you'd have said it 20 years ago, I'd say, yeah, it was probably possible to do, but how big of a spectacle and everything that's on the line in a Ryder Cup now, I just think it would be a very difficult position to be in.'
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McIlroy has not played since the Open Championship last month, including skipping the start of the FedEx Cup playoffs last week. It was a controversial move for some, which McIlroy seems to understand.
'You're trying to balance a lot of different things. You're trying to balance the competitive integrity of what the playoffs are, but you're also trying to keep the media rights partners happy, you're trying to keep the sponsors happy. They're the people that are paying the big bucks to expect the big names to be playing in their golf tournaments, and that's a delicate balance,' McIlroy said.
McIlroy said that if the PGA Tour wants to resemble more of a traditional playoffs with real elimination stakes, he's a fan of an approach where 70 players make the playoffs and points are zeroed out so that only the top 50 in Week 1 make Week 2, and then the top 30 players make the Tour Championship.
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