Rory McIlroy: 'You can't keep all the plates spinning, something had to give'

The golfing superstar agrees that right now, he is the happiest he's been in a long time. His exit from involvement in golf's political side has played a major part in that

RORY STORY: Rory McIlroy will have a DP World Tour award named after him - but he can't win it himself. Pic: Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)

Rory McIlroy's initial instinct when approached about having a DP World Tour award named after him was that it was "a bit soon". It was announced on Tuesday that the tour's best performing member across the four majors will receive the Rory McIlroy Award. The man himself will be ineligible to win it.

"The more I thought about it, I'm not going to be around forever playing," said McIlroy.

"It will still be amazing to have my name, after my playing days, associated with this tour, and hopefully have an award named after me that means something to future generations that they want to strive towards to achieve.

"An amazing honour to have my name up there along with Harry Vardon and Sir Henry Cotton and Seve Ballesteros and John Jacobs, that's very special." 

The world number two will play the DP World Tour Championship at the Earth Course this week aiming to win a seventh Order of Merit title. He leads the Race to Dubai rankings by 767 points from Marco Penge. A victory this year would be his fourth consecutive time winning the Harry Vardon Trophy, and put him one title behind all-time leader Colin Montgomerie.

"I wanted to prioritise it again," said McIlroy. 

"You look at my third Race to Dubai title in 2015, and there's a big gap, but in that gap, I won tree FedExCup titles. So it was almost as if I prioritised a little bit the other side of the pond.

"I think after covid, I said, 'What are some things that I want to do for the ten or 15 years of my career?' One of those was trying to prioritise this tour a little bit again and trying to win The Race to Dubai a few more times.

"It's also coincided with better play in the majors. Because as a dual member of both, to have a chance to win, you really need to play well in those bigger events."

McIlroy agreed that he is now the happiest he's been in a long time. 

"I'm certainly not less driven but maybe just more driven in focused areas," he said.

"I don't feel like chasing as much anymore. I'm not out chasing the Grand Slam. I'm not chasing these things. I'm very content with what I've done in the game. I'm still driven to do more but you know, it's sort of a pinpoint to drive in certain directions.

"I have a clear head and I'm out of all the political stuff in golf, basically, and I can just focus on playing and playing where I want to and making myself competitively happy by playing in the tournaments that I want to play.

"And then having more time to make myself personally happy with doing the things I want to do away from golf, travelling with my family and showing my daughter different parts of the world and doing things like that I think is a very nice place to be in life."

McIlroy said being involved with the political side of the game was "something that I really wanted to do but at the same time I felt like it was taking away from some of the other things I want to do in my life.

"You can't keep all the plates spinning at the same time and something had to give, and that was the thing that ultimately I had to stop doing to pursue some of these other things.

"If you look at my golf since then, it been a pretty good run. It's been a nice -- maybe a bit of a clearer head and a little bit more time to spend on practise and putting that into my game."