Need your opinions

[chumbucket]

I'm trying to help out a buddy. He's looking at buying a used motor. We looked at this mid-'90's Merc. Everything checks out pretty well. The only area of possible concern that I could see was the shift rod. It appears that the alignment was off a bit and at some point someone may have ground out the hole to the lower unit to get it in and shift. You can see in the pics where it comes down through the steering tube, it favors the rear of the tube and is hard up against it. The lower unit case is ground with an elongated hole with splines showing. The motor does seem to shift in and out of gear okay.
So my question; should he be concerned with this or not?