IF we have to live in a world where someone is paid £15m a year by Nike, then I’m glad that someone is Rory McIlroy.
The world’s number one golfer seems a thoroughly likeable young man who just happens to be the planet’s finest exponent of a sport played by millions.
Nike, having agreed to pay McIlroy £156m over the next decade, will want their prize asset to keep his nose clean – unlike the last golfing sensation who took a wheelbarrow of the company’s cash to wear their swoosh.
So don’t be surprised if this means the world’s number one golfer decides to sit out the world’s number one sporting event in three years’ time.
Golf will feature in the Olympics for the first time at Rio 2016, which is a bit of a dilemma for Northern Ireland’s most famous son.
On the one hand, McIlroy is a Catholic whose great uncle was murdered by loyalist paramilitaries. On the other, he grew up in an overwhelmingly Protestant area, playing a mainly Protestant game.
As McIlroy explained last year, he is “a proud product of Irish golf” but also a “proud Ulsterman who grew up in Northern Ireland which is a part of the United Kingdom”.
A Facebook page urging the young golfer to “turn down the tricolour” of the Irish Republic has been liked by 11,000 people, a small proportion of whom may have featured on your televisions in the last month throwing petrol bombs at the police.
Over on the other side of the fence, a former Sinn Fein aide tweeted a sectarian insult about McIlroy last year after the golfer posed with an Ulster flag having helped Europe to that historic Ryder Cup comeback.
Expect more of that with bells on if he opts to represent Britain in Rio.
With the world at his feet and £15m of Nike’s money rolling into his bank account every year, I wouldn’t be surprised if McIlroy decides he’d rather sit out the Rio Olympics than become involved in a sectarian tug-of-war. It would be an awful shame. I just hope the right people realise that they’re the ones who should feel ashamed.
