McDowell's biggest LIV regret - he will be the forgotten man at the Open in his hometown

The 42

2 days ago

ON THE EVE of the 2019 Open Championship at Royal Portrush, the media gathered around Graeme McDowell for a lengthy press conference and tapped him for insights to his hometown as if he were the local mayor.
McDowell was asked about the town and its golf courses and the nearby sights to see; he was asked of how he helped bring the Open back to Royal Portrush and what that return said about post-Troubles Northern Ireland; he was even asked to explain George Best to Americans and give a view on the Orange parade planned by the local Sons of Ulster for the Saturday of the tournament.
McDowell, in other words, was treated as both emblem of and spokesperson for a mega-event with a significance that transcended the merely sporting.
Skip forward six years and the Open is back at Portrush but McDowell is not. And with Rory McIlroy, Shane Lowry, Darren Clarke, and Pádraig Harrington sufficient to soak up the crowd's full spillage of adulation, McDowell's absence will hardly be noted.
McDowell grew up in Portrush and was within the mandatory 30-mile radius to be eligible to join Rathmore, a cheaper, accessible club beside Royal Portrush which offered frequent access to next week's Open venue.
Portrush introduced McDowell to golf and it uncovered inspiration too. McDowell, wowed by the amateur exploits of Ricky Elliott – now caddie to Brooks Koepka – followed him to an American college, from which McDowell emerged with a sharpened competitive edge and a twang to go with the lilt in his accent.
But now golf's most historic championship is setting up in his home and McDowell is not invited. His absence is a fact so translucent he can hardly even be said to be a ghost at golf's great feast.
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Crowds following McDowell during the 2019 Open. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo
The LIV Tour gifted McDowell an outlandish pension plan but every deal has its trade-offs, and he will stew upon them in his hometown exile next week.
Now ranked at number 1,562 in the world, McDowell did try to play his way in to this year's Open, but finished three shots shy of a golden ticket in the incongruous surrounds of final qualifying at Royal Cinque Ports in Kent. Major champions are supposed to do their fretting and sweating and dreaming on a Sunday afternoon, not a Tuesday evening.
McDowell's career was already listing six years ago – and it was only by major effort and resolve that he qualified for the 2019 Open at all, sealing his spot only a month in advance at the Canadian Open – so all trends and trajectories suggest that he wouldn't have qualified this time around even if he had ignored Saudi overtures and kept on battling for ranking points and his Tour card.
But he might not have felt like such an irrelevance to next week all the same.
For one thing, had McDowell not gone to LIV, he would almost certainly have been casting an eye over Portrush next week in some kind of Ryder Cup capacity, be it as outright captain or one of the phalanx of deputies. You'd also wonder how much more appealing he would have been to broadcasters like Sky or NBC had he not jumped ship.
McDowell instead bartered away those opportunities for cash, and if ever these consequences will sting, it will be next week.
He has been hurt by the hometown reaction to his defection in the past, asked during an interview at the JP McManus pro-am at Adare Manor three years to respond to a Belfast Telegraph front page in which Amnesty International rounded on his justifying Saudi foreign policy.
'I don't read The Belfast Telegraph,' replied McDowell without conviction.
'Don't even f***ing tell me what was on the front — is that a real paper? . . . No one reads it anyway, it's OK.'
'Listen, f**k, like some guy from Amnesty International, sent me the quotes, asked me to respond. How am I supposed to respond to Amnesty International? So yeah, not real happy with The Belfast Telegraph. For my family to read that shit. . . it's unfair.'
This followed only a month after his car-crash press conference ahead of the very first LIV event, at which he got himself hopelessly tangled in trying to respond to questions about Saudi Arabia's human rights record, to the point he and his fellow players were memorably asked at which point would they draw the line. Would you play a tournament organised by Vladimir Putin?
At the time, McDowell's public squirming felt the very least he deserved. With time, however, it's hard not to feel some pity for him. As one of the first defectors, McDowell was an early LIV mudguard, there to take the flak from the media's righteous early objections. But in professional sport, moral outrage has a very short half-life. Contrast McDowell's interrogation to the reaction with which Jon Rahm was met when he threw his lot in with the Saudis: McIlroy, for instance, quickly appeared on Sky Sports to argue the Ryder Cup eligibility rules had to be changed to allow for Rahm to play at Bethpage.
Everywhere you look in pro golf at the moment, you see people retreating from the moral stance into which they tumbled three years ago.
The PGA Tour, standing so staunchly against LIV with their 'legacy, not leverage' motto, met with the Saudis in secret not long after McDowell's move, in a bid to cook up a merger and an end to an expensive war.
The R&A meanwhile obliquely said after 6 January in 2021 that they wouldn't be returning to Donald Trump's Turnberry as they feared the focus 'would not be on the championship', but are now receptive to talks to see the course host the 2028 Open, at least partly at the behest of a craven Downing Street.
McDowell would be forgiven for feeling his error was not in joining LIV but in being among the first to do so, given his move came during a tiny blip in the history of professional golf in which everyone felt there were basic moral causes worth falling out over. That's not the case anymore, though McDowell continues to suffer the cold shoulder.
McDowell's move to LIV has been undoubtedly lucrative, but it has been costly too; costs that will be visible next week only to Graeme McDowell.