Rory: "If they want to try to contain what we do as touring professionals, I'm all for that."

It’s rare in golf history to have an active player call for sensible regulation or a splitting off of the pros from amateurs, but Rory McIlroy did it yesterday at Riviera.

Speaking in advance of the Genesis Invitational, answering a question from the LA Times’ Mike James who filed this piece on the distance debate:

Q. Rory, where do you see the discussion after the distance insight survey evolving and where would you like to see it end up?

RORY McILROY: How long have you got?

Q. I have lots of time.

RORY McILROY: You know, I think the biggest thing that came out of the report for me, a lot of the stuff about the ball going too far and technology, it really pertains to 0.1 percent of golfers out there. So look, if they want to try to contain what we do as touring professionals, I'm all for that.

Selfishly, I think that that's only a good thing for the better players, but for the game in general, I think one of the best things that came out of it was the sustainability aspect and the fact that architects building these golf courses, and not even architects to a degree, but also the people that are giving the architects the money to build these golf courses with this grand ambition of maybe having a Tour event one day. Building these golf courses on these massive pieces of land, having to use so much water, so much fertilizer, pesticides, all the stuff that we really shouldn't be doing nowadays especially in the climate we live in and everything that's happening in our world. You look at what happened in Australia, you look at what happens in this state every August, September, October time with fires and global warming.

I think golf has a responsibility to minimize its footprint as much as it possibly can. For me, I think the sustainability aspect of what they're trying to do is very important and that's the one thing I would definitely stand behind.