Collin Morikawa Turns Question About PGA-LIV Pact on Its Head

The 26-year-old PGA Tour pro creatively answered a query about the controversial topic.

LOS ANGELES – Collin Morikawa had an interesting response to the inevitable question about the PGA Tour alliance with the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia.

“Yeah, I don’t know anything,” Morikawa said at a news conference in advance of the U.S. Open on Tuesday at Los Angeles Country Club. “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 L.A. 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 most 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.”

Morikawa, a two-time major champion who grew up in the Los Angeles area, did eventually give an answer to the PGA Tour/PIF question.

When asked what he’d like to know most, Morikawa said: “That’s hard because I think for a lot of different parties there’s a lot of different reasons of why it’s happening. So we all want to know the why. We’re so interested in the why.

“For me right now, it’s just like what’s going to happen? I don’t know. But we always want to know that why answer. Like what’s the purpose behind it.

“But I think there’s so many different parties involved that there’s too many answers to really put it into one underlying umbrella of the why, because I think what you’ve seen from the players versus what you’ve seen from maybe our commissioner versus the board versus Yasir versus LIV versus—there’s a lot of parties involved. Everyone has had a kind of different answer and different reaction to all this.

“So the why is—I think that’s going to be very opinionated, and I don’t think we’ll ever really get an answer. But we don’t even know what’s going to happen. Or maybe you do.”

Morikawa, who is ranked 18th in the world and has been as high as No. 2, explained his health situation after withdrawing prior to the final round of the Memorial tournament on June 4. Morikawa was just two shots out of the lead but injured his back while warming up in the gym prior to the round.

“It was weird,” he said. “I’ve had I wouldn’t say back problems, but I’ve had a little back pain here and there. Nothing has been crazy, and it’s not been because of golf, and this wasn’t because of golf. It was just bad movement. We were in the gym warming up doing some reactive exercises. I went after with my back.

“It sucked, because I felt like I was grinding for three days to put myself in contention. We figured some things out Saturday afternoon. That’s when you’re excited to wake up, and you’re like, man, we can put together a few birdies early on and you’re right there tied for the lead.

“Who knows what could have happened, but it’s very unfortunate. It sucked. It’s a course that I loved. I took a few days off, got some rest, got some rehab, talked with my team, we got started hitting balls late last week, and we’re swinging fine.

“There’s no pain swinging right now, which is great. I might be teeing up kind of weirdly this week, so don’t take too much into that, but it’s just precautionary.”