It’s hard to answer what you do not know, and if the past week in golf has told us anything, it’s that so few people have any idea of what’s going in in the professional game.
Still, questions about the surprise partnership between Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and the PGA Tour have to be asked, so credit Collin Morikawa for his clever reply.
Morikawa, you may remember, had a hilarious, somewhat indignant response—and a response that was echoed by many players—to last Tuesday’s shocking news, tweeting, “I love finding out morning news on Twitter.” Speaking to the media on Tuesday at Los Angeles Country Club, the two-time major winner was asked his thoughts on the potential deal, now that he’s had a week to marinate on it, and Morikawa started by saying the obvious before making a hard zag.
“Yeah. I don’t know anything,” Morikawa said. “So I’ll talk about my FORE Youth Project that we’re doing. It’s this Maggie Hathaway project. It’s amazing. It’s in a community that is for underprivileged kids, kids that don’t have an opportunity to play. There’s many great organizations coming on board with this, and it’s something that means a lot to me.
“I think LA has a big divide. We get to play Riviera every year, we play LACC this year. There’s a huge divide between private golf and public golf out here in Los Angeles. It’s not the case for everyone, but there really is, and mots people are playing public municipal golf courses, and the change of this golf course is going to be great.
“It’s going to give opportunities I think that I’ve learned from golf that are able to just teach kids just the real world. School teaches a lot of things, but the real world is you can learn a lot from golf. That’s my answer.”
We take it back. That wasn’t a brilliant response; he was gaslighting the media. The nerve. (We kid, we kid.)
As for trying to block out the noise from the off-the-course news, Morikawa admitted there’s no right answer, only that he’s done his best to keep himself out of the tug-of-war.
“I mean, it is what it is. I can’t control what’s going to happen. None of us can, no matter what we write up or what we say,” Morikawa said. “This is a major that I cared about when I was like in college and I knew about LACC hosting a U.S. Open. I didn’t know where my path was going to be. I didn’t know if I was going to be on tour, if I was going to have to qualify for this, and, right, four years, pretty much four years since I’ve been pro. I didn’t know where I was going to be, but this is the one that I wanted to make it and be at just because it is home for me. This week means so much. It always will be. It’ll always be really special.”
