Rory McIlroy quits Twitter — for now — after beef with Steve Elkington

Rory McIlroy ditches Twitter after acknowledging that he regrets responding to disrespectful tweets from a former PGA Champion.

Rory McIlroy has joined the ranks of Dottie Pepper, Lee Westwood, Pat Perez, Stacy Lewis, Morgan Pressel, and other notables of the golf world who have threatened to or have actually left Twitter for a period of time.

Pepper and Perez blasted “trolls” for forcing them off the social media platform, and Lewis and Pressel returned to Twitter after taking leaves of absence for other reasons.

In McIlroy’s case, his Twitter tiff with 1995 PGA Champion winner Steve Elkington caused the Ulsterman to tune out the noise, at least for a bit. McIlroy said on Wednesday that his heated response to Elkington’s assertion that he was “bored” while missing the cut at last month’s U.S. Open at Erin Hills convinced him he needed a break from the Twitter-verse.

“I must have wrote that tweet and deleted it about five times before I actually sent it,” McIlroy said from the Irish Open, where he hopes this week to defend his 2016 title. “It’s one of those things.”

Somewhere, Brandel Chamblee is smiling. The Golf Channel analyst wrote earlier this year that “golf should ban Twitter, not because it is interfering with the practice of the game, but because it is interfering with the civility of it.

“Twitter may have originally been a burst of inconsequential information, but it has turned into 140 characters of kindling, burning civility to a fine crisp,” Chamblee said on GolfChannel.com. “I can understand the discord involving politics, religion and war, but what is there to argue about in golf, I mean, besides the fact I am still paid to talk about it for a living?”

We’re guessing McIlroy would agree with that sentiment.

“I sort of regret sending it at the end but I actually gave my wife, Erica, my phone and my Twitter and told her, ‘change my password to something else and don’t tell me what it is,’” he said, according to multiple reports. “I’m off social media just because of that reason. I don’t need to read it. It’s stuff that shouldn’t get to you and sometimes it does.”

McIlroy added that he was especially irritated by the source of the “bored” comment since Elkington understood the stress that comes with playing major championship golf. Perhaps he did at one time, back before Y2K, which is when he last won on the PGA Tour, but the author of that particular hot take is now known far more for his terrible tweets — like this bigoted post about Michael Sam at the NFL Combine that earned him a suspension from the PGA Tour — than his skills on the golf course.

Still, he did win a major, which is what really ticked off McIlroy.

"It's not what was said, it was who said it,” said McIlroy. “Anyone that has been in that environment should realize how golf is at times and I think that's the thing that got to me more than anything else.”

McIlroy noted he “could let it slide” if a media member had dissed him because “they don't know how it is and what you have to deal with. But a former player that has won a major and been successful, that's why it got to me and why I retaliated."