A rumor that circulated online in October 2025 claimed professional golfer Rory McIlroy donated his bonus from the 2025 Ryder Cup, a tournament between a team of American golfers and a team of European golfers, to help homeless people in his native Northern Ireland. According to the story, McIlroy donated his “entire $10.9 million bonus” from the Ryder Cup to fund a series of homeless support centers to create 150 housing units and 300 beds for people in need. Snopes readers emailed us to ask whether the rumor was true.
The rumor spread most widely through Facebook (archived), where one post spreading the rumor was liked about 100,000 times. The claim was also shared to X (archived), including by former professional tennis player and commentator Boris Becker (archived).
Some of the Facebook posts spreading the claim, including the most popular post, featured links in top comments leading to articles hosted by WordPress blogs, such as one advertisement-filled story hosted on the luxury.carmagazine.tv website.
However, searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo found no credible news media outlets reporting about McIlroy’s supposed donation to a charity for homeless people. Prominent news media outlets would have widely reported this rumor, if true. McIlroy did not post he was making such a donation to his social media accounts, either.
McIlroy didn’t even have a Ryder Cup bonus to donate. While the American team received pay for the first time in the 2025 Ryder Cup, according to GOLF.com, the European team continued to participate in the tournament without pay. In November 2024, McIlroy told the BBC that he did not need money to play in the Ryder Cup, even going so far as to say he “would pay for the privilege to play on the Ryder Cup.”
Snopes ran the text of the story from the luxury.carmagazine.tv link through ZeroGPT, which is a tool for detecting artificial intelligence (AI) generated text. ZeroGPT found that at least a third of the text was likely generated by artificial intelligence. Although these tools aren’t 100% accurate, there is evidence within the text itself of the story not being factual, if not written by AI. For example, the story claims McIlroy has four major wins and 26 PGA Tour wins, both of which are outdated stats. At the time the story was written, McIlroy had won his fifth major earlier in the year, which was one of three PGA Tour events he won in 2025 to bring his career total to 29 PGA Tour wins.
This particular story fits a formula standard to the Facebook page that shared the rumor and link, Golf Today Insight. It has routinely posted false stories with commented links to advertisement-filled articles, many of which included AI-generated images. Additionally, the page used AI-generated images for its profile picture and cover photo.
The person or people who authored the story fabricated the entire tale as one of hundreds of inspirational tales that depicted celebrities and athletes performing inspiring acts of kindness. They aimed to earn advertising revenue on websites linked from the aforementioned Facebook posts.
These stories all very much resembled glurge, which Dictionary.com defines as “stories, often sent by email, that are supposed to be true and uplifting, but which are often fabricated and sentimental.”
Snopes has fact-checked a number of such stories claiming that celebrities, often athletes, donated to charities that support homeless people. These include false stories about NFL star Patrick Mahomes, NHL star Connor McDavid and NFL star Travis Kelce all making donations to homeless shelters.
Snopes even reported on a false claim that McIlroy donated his winnings from his victory in the 2025 Masters tournament. In fact, that rumor was similarly spread by Facebook pages sharing links to WordPress blogs, including one with the same “Luxury Blogs” header that was used for the luxury.carmagazine.tv link.
