What’s REALLY behind golfer Rory McIlroy’s divorce U-turn

Has there ever been a less emotional expression of joy over a marital reunion? Golfer Rory McIlroy, on the face of it a naturally rather quiet Northern Irishman, released a bloodless — even corporate — update on his tumultuous private life this week.

Revealing the surprising news that he had patched up his marriage with wife Erica Stoll after filing for divorce a month ago, it ran: ‘There have been rumours about my personal life recently, which is unfortunate.

‘Responding to each rumour is a fool’s game. Over the past weeks, Erica and I have realised that our best future was as a family together. Thankfully, we have resolved our differences and look forward to a new beginning.’

The timing of the statement, in the week of the U.S. Open — just as McIlroy says he has his best shot in years of winning another major title — seems extraordinary.

So why are they back together? And why now?

One source close to the sportsman yesterday said the real reason driving the reconciliation was that McIlroy ‘can’t be on his own for more than five minutes’, adding that, quite simply, he ‘needs the stability’.

Another said he believes the multimillionaire golfer has been told by his team that he’s been too hasty in his divorce filing and should give his marriage ‘another six months’.

The source said: ‘Rory is a bit of a law unto himself. I have heard that they’ve decided to give it six months and see how they both feel at the end of it. That would make sense. Filing for divorce was all about Rory rushing into things. He is very spur of the moment and will just decide something without giving it much thought. He’ll definitely have been advised to give it six months.’

There was widespread surprise when McIlroy, 35, filed to divorce Stoll, 36, the mother of their three-year-old daughter Poppy.

A petition was served on her at their £10million mansion in Jupiter, Florida, on May 13, asking for shared parental custody of their little girl and for a judge to enforce a pre-nuptial agreement the couple signed prior to their marriage in 2017.

 There had been no outward signs of trouble in their union —although the world of professional golf is notoriously hard on marriages. McIlroy’s legal move came after he was seen flirting with blonde golf TV presenter Amanda Balionis on camera, and there were unconfirmed reports — from anonymous sports fans on X and the gossip site Deuxmoi — that he had been spending time with her off-camera in San Diego.

The rumours were fuelled by the sudden collapse of Balionis’s marriage earlier this year and by McIlroy recently endorsing her dog charity.

Just a day before McIlroy announced his divorce, a friend, Camille Stroud, wrote ‘You two’ alongside a heart emoji beneath an Instagram picture of Balionis interviewing him on CBS.

Neither Balionis nor McIlroy, who is worth £250 million, denied that a romance had sprung up.

To date, there has been no comment from McIlroy’s management or Balionis’s New York PR representatives at the firm 42 West.

One source said: ‘No one will be surprised if Rory has someone else lined up. It’s textbook behaviour. Look back at his love life. This isn’t a guy who likes to be alone. The next conquest always appears before the current one goes. I’ve known the guy a long time and there’s always an overlap.’

However, around a week ago a ‘friend’ told the magazine U.S. Weekly that, whatever he and Balionis had, it wasn’t a romance.

One of McIlroy’s friends on the golf tour said this week that he believed the link was ‘a flirty relationship’, but one that had never progressed as far as being a full-blown love affair of the sort which might ruin a marriage. A friend said yesterday: ‘What is Rory doing? I don’t think he knows what he’s doing. Whatever I say to you will be redundant by the end of the day! Let’s just say, he’s not predictable, shall we?

‘I suppose the sensible answer to all this is that he just doesn’t know what he wants.

‘He definitely can’t be on his own for more than about five minutes, which is why the story about him having someone else lined up made sense for a lot of people, though I never believed it.

 ‘I think people would know if he had been having a fling with a fairly well-known golf TV presenter. There were rumours, but they were pure gossip.

‘Rory is a nice guy. He’s a good friend and a great golfer, but he’s not a great partner. I’m not party to the details of his marriage, but I do know that it’s very unbalanced, with him having all the power and her running in circles after him like a 1950s wife.’

The friend said Erica ‘does provide the stability that he desperately wants and needs. He won’t cope without anyone at all, but perhaps he thought at the time [of filing for divorce] that she wasn’t the right person.’

The source added: ‘Could I be really cynical and say perhaps this is a way of him avoiding a massive payment to her?

‘He has a huge legal team who are very good friends, but would he take their advice? I don’t know. He doesn’t seem to want to take anyone’s advice.

‘There are lots of rumours swirling that he’s done this because he realised how much money he would lose. He’s definitely a man who likes his money. This is the thing with golfers — the amount of money they’ve made is a direct reflection of how good they are, and prize money is everything.

‘So his wealth is a sign to him of how good he is as a golfer, and he won’t be keen to start splitting that. I think it could be a mixture of the realisation that he won’t see as much of his daughter and will lose half of his money that has made him rethink.

‘Also, he’s really not very good on his own. That could’ve been in the thinking as well.’

McIlroy met New York-born Stoll through the game. He overslept during the 2012 Ryder Cup and nearly missed his tee time. Erica, who was working for the Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA), arranged a police escort to get him to the course in Medinah, Illinois, in time.

They kept on bumping into each other as Stoll continued to work for the PGA and the couple started dating at the end of 2014, after his split from tennis player Caroline Wozniacki.

He famously broke the heart of his first love, Holly Sweeney — whom he met when she was 14 and he was 16 — when they split in 2011 after he fell for Wozniacki, then world No 1. He then broke Wozniacki’s heart when he dumped her abruptly just after she had sent out wedding invitations.

McIlroy and Stoll got engaged in Paris in 2015 and were married two years later at the 13th-century Ashford Castle in County Mayo, with guests including One Direction’s Niall Horan, Coldplay’s Chris Martin, Ed Sheeran and actor Jamie Dornan, who grew up in the same town in County Down as McIlroy. Stevie Wonder provided the entertainment. The celebrations were said to have cost £400,000. Home for Stoll and McIlroy is a ten-bathroom mansion in Florida’s exclusive Bear’s Club gated community, founded by golf legend Jack Nicklaus, where basketball star Michael Jordan and tennis sisters Venus and Serena Williams are neighbours.

There is also UK property in Wentworth, Surrey, home of the DP World Tour, formerly the European Tour, where he and Erica were said to have spent £10million on renovations.

The thinking is that the family will take up full-time residence there when Poppy is ready for secondary school.

But how easy will they find it to patch up their marriage after McIlroy announced it was all over? Reheating the marital souffle is a trick very few are able to pull off — nothing destroys trust quite like a missive from your partner’s lawyer.

In McIlroy’s past there is also a high-profile romance with model Nadia Forde in 2014 and there were even rumoured links to Meghan Markle, pre-Prince Harry, the same year.

But there’s also a good reason golf is well known as a matrimonial graveyard.

Many wives insist on accompanying their husbands to tournaments so they can keep an eye on them. But often, they just can’t —which appears to be what happened to McIlroy and Stoll. Once a couple has started a family, husbands often spend most of the year on tour, separated from their wives.

Organisations such as the PGA habitually employ pretty young golf fans to do administrative roles, while sponsors similarly send teams of attractive women who orbit the players.

A source told U.S. Weekly in May that there are other issues, too. Apparently Stoll had been feeling ‘lonely’ in the marriage as the couple were effectively leading separate lives. The source said: ‘She knew what she was getting into with his profession, but once they had Poppy things really changed and she had a new perspective. Erica was usually absent for most of his tournaments and was really focused on Poppy.’

Another potential factor — other than the constant travelling and temptations — is McIlroy’s role in the schism which split the game, when the Saudi-backed LIV Golf set up as a rival to the PGA tour in 2022. McIlroy was the figurehead for the PGA and strongly backed the tour.

In the second series of the Netflix documentary Full Swing, filmed last summer, he said: ‘It’s all consuming. It’s a full-time job playing golf and having all the other stuff. You get fatigued. I had to ask myself a lot of questions. It’s so difficult.’

A year ago the warring sides came to an agreement — and a crestfallen McIlroy revealed he didn’t even know that the announcement was coming. He felt he had wasted 12 months of his life. The angst, though, coincided with a revival in his professional fortunes.

A thoughtful but brilliant player, it seems he performs particularly well when his private life is under pressure.

It’s not the first time McIlroy has detonated his private life on the eve of a tournament. In 2014, he split from fiancee Wozniacki days before the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth — the European Tour’s flagship event —which he went on to win.

‘For whatever reason, I seem to play very good golf whenever I have a lot of stuff going on,’ he once remarked.

And now he thinks he is poised to best his rivals at the U.S. Open, which starts today.

‘I’m really proud of my body of work over the past 15 years and everything that I have achieved,’ McIllroy said this week.

‘Obviously, getting my hands on a fifth major has taken quite a while, but I’m more confident than ever that I’m right there — that I’m as close as I’ve ever been.’