Rory McIlroy Quits Twitter after Feud with Steve Elkington

As much as golf has attempted to become more social media friendly as a sport, there have always been golfers that have great personalities on social media platforms. Rory McIlroy, however, has decided to end his time on Twitter after a feud.

McIlroy has been known to be quite active on Twitter in the past but decided to end his social network interactions after getting into a battle with former PGA Championship winner and current Senior Tour player Steve Elkington.  Elkington started the argument by saying that McIlroy was bored with golf and that winning 4 majors while pocketing $100 million was good enough in the post-Tiger era. McIlroy wasn’t going to take that quietly, however.

In response, McIlroy stated that it was more like $200 million and that there would be more to come from him. Elkington, who brought up money to begin with, then attacked Rory for bringing up his total winnings, calling him a money guy. McIlroy really delivered a knockout punch after this comment though, by hitting Elkington for spelling the word “knew” wrong and implying that Elkington didn’t learn grammar when he was younger.

That's why jack designed 100's of golf courses… and it's knew… mustn't have taught grammar in the 50's….

— Rory McIlroy (@McIlroyRory) June 17, 2017

This petty feud that he got caught up in is what made Rory decide to leave social media platforms altogether. He said this week that “If it was written by a member of the media or something I could let it slide, because I can sort of say to myself, they don’t really know how it is and they don’t know what you have to deal with. But a former player that has won a major and been successful, that’s sort of why it got to me and that’s why I sort of retaliated a little bit.”

For those who are holding out hope that Rory will return to social media sometime in the future, it is not totally out of the realm of possibility. Instead of permanently deleting the account, McIlroy simply gave his account to his wife and told her to change the password so he could not log in. So if his wife gives up the password in the future, Rory could be back to sending out 140 character messages.

This is just another example of the negatives that social media brings to athletes and hopefully, it will serve as a good learning lesson for some other players who are active on social media.

Cover Image via Instagram