Four-time Major winner Rory McIlory has revealed that he still "hates" LIV golf even in the aftermath of the merger between the Saudi backed league, PGA Tour and DP World Tour.
The Northern Irishman, who was speaking ahead of the defence of the RBC Canadian Open, insisted that the move wasn't actually a merger and that the entities would remain separate but would be under the same umbrella.
The move ends legal action between players on both tours and opens the door for an end to the civil war which has engulfed golf for the past year or so.
READ MORE: Rory McIlroy says players who joined LIV Golf 'won't just be welcome back' on PGA Tour
The one-time warring fractions will come together at the US Open in LA next week for the first time since the merger was announced and 2014 Open champion McIlroy said: “The future of the PGA looks brighter as an entity. There still has to be consequences. We can’t just welcome those who walked away back in and pretend nothing happened. That won’t happen. I still hate LIV. I hope it goes away and full expect it does. But at the end of the day money talks and you'd rather have them as a partner," reports the Daily Record.
"Ultimately when I try to remove myself from the situation I think it will be good for the game of golf. It unifies it and secures its financial situation. There’s mixed emotions. I don’t know all the intricacies of what’s going on. There’s a lot of things to be thrashed out but at least it means the litigation goes away which has been a massive burden for everyone involved in the Tour.
"I got a text message on Monday night from Jimmy Dunne asking if he could call me. He took me through the deal, the structure of the deal. I learned about it pretty much the same time as everyone else did. It was a surprise. I knew discussions were going on in the background but didn’t expect it to go through as quickly as it did.
“We can start to work toward some sort of way of unifying the game at elite level. The one thing I think was misconstrued was the headlines were PGA Tour merges with LIV. I was frustrated at that. All I’ve wanted to do is protect the future of the PGA Tour and what it stands for and I hope this does that. The headlines were merges with LIV but if you look at how it’s structured this company sits above that. The PGA Tour have control of everything. Whether you like it or not PIF is going to invest money in golf but PGA controls how that is spent."
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