Gleeful Rory McIlroy sounds off on the viral US Ryder Cup T-shirt allegedly bearing his silhouette

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[PHOTO: Andrew Redington]

We’re two weeks away from the 2025 Ryder Cup, and the head games have reached a brain-frying fever pitch. The air is thick with subterfuge, espionage, gaslighting and various other forms of psychological warfare. Fact can no longer be separated from fiction and the only guiding light in this misty-mirror world is The Narrative, which, ironically enough, is an infamously unreliable narrator.

All of which is a very long way of saying, we have a huge merchandise crisis on our hands. Gaze upon America’s lowest ebb and weep.

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Where to even begin? First, let’s say the thing that most needs saying: $US65 ($A99) for a T-shirt is a crime, even if Ralph sewed each one himself. Plus it’s 100 percent cotton, so you know it’s going to shrink up to your belly button at the first whiff of laundry detergent. Throw whoever greenlit this thing in Shawshank and swallow the key.

With that established, we return to the most pressing issue at hand: the silhouette. Is that really Rory McIlroy? Could the US Ryder Cup power brokers really be that clueless? Was this an inside job? No one can answer that question better than McIlory himself, who was asked about the familiar likeness at Wentworth on Tuesday. Try as he might to remain civil, the partisan glee was written all over his face.

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Perhaps in the interest of diplomacy, McIlroy said the silhouette looked more like our own Adam Scott than himself, which our own swing guru Luke Kerr-Dineen called on X moments before the Masters champion’s response went viral.

But like we said, Adam Scott or Adam Not, the only true gauge of this is The Narrative. Whatever people see in this Ryder Cup Rorschach Test – real, imagined or somewhere in between – will define what it is and isn’t. Not that McIlroy is losing sleep over it either way. Asked how he would feel about oblivious New York finance bros wandering around Bethpage Black in an overpriced T-shirt bearing a silhouette similar to his own, he replied simply and honestly.

“That’s OK. That’s fine. I won’t mind that.”