For years, I had been looking ahead to the 2025 Ryder Cup with dread. It was as if organizers had set a date for one of my favorite sporting events to self-destruct.
The biennial match between American and European golfers, which alternates between American and European soil, is not the only team event in the sport. But it is the only good one.
The event goes back nearly 100 years. For much of that history, it was a friendly competition in which the American team would routinely crush their counterparts from Great Britain and Ireland. Everyone had a nice time. Since continental Europeans were added to the competition in 1979, the matches have not just become more competitive: Europe has been the stronger team despite having less talent on paper.
This drives the American team crazy, and no amount of analytics, task forces, or team captaincy strategies have changed the dynamic. Since 1993, Europe has won four Ryder Cups on American soil. The Americans have won none in Europe. The American team’s endless quest to change this dynamic and the Europeans’ delight in regularly besting the boorish Yanks have helped the event grow in hype, size, corporate hospitality, and most importantly, revenue.
But there’s another important reason for the event’s popularity beyond the stakes. It’s the only meaningful golf event in which spectators are not just allowed, but encouraged, to boo and jeer the golfers they don’t like. This brings in a certain element of what golf snobs—don’t look at me!—might call irregular golf fans whose interest in the event lies in the jeering. With each successive Cup, the jeering has veered more into harassment, and then into bile—and yes, it seems worse on the American side. It was bad enough at the 2021 event that some European players’ families decided they didn’t want to come again. That one was held in Wisconsin, where the people are supposed to be nice.
The 2025 Ryder Cup was to held be on Long Island, amid New York sports fans, at the same course—Bethpage Black—where spectators caused a 2019 ruckus for jeering at a tournament where you’re not supposed to do that. And so the combination of pressure on Americans to win, the unfortunate trend toward idiots wanting to become famous on social media by shouting things at sporting events, and the famous directness among New York sports fans, made what ensued over this past weekend one of the more predictable embarrassments in event-planning history.
The tone was set at dawn on Friday, ahead of the opening tee shots. Whereas European crowds will come up with cheeky, cutting ways, often delivered in the form of song, to get under the Americans’ skin, the American crowd just went straight into an endless rendition of “Fuck you, Rory!” (clap, clap, clap clap clap) directed at the Europeans’ star player, Rory McIlroy. The emcee at the opening tee, comedian Heather McMahan, even participated in the chant during Saturday’s rendition. She had stepped down by Sunday.
Europeans didn’t come into this blindly. Many if not most of them live in the United States now, play on American tours, and are aware of Long Island. The team captain, England’s Luke Donald, had tried to acclimate his players by giving them virtual-reality headsets designed to simulate the harassment.
“You can get them to say whatever you want them to say,” McIlroy told the press in mid-September. “So you can go as close to the bone as you like.”
That shouldn’t have given attendees license, though, to go as close to the bone as they did. McIlroy, as the star of the team, absorbed most of the invective for three straight days. He can handle people telling him how much he sucks, or how much of a choker he is, endlessly. He’ll even appreciate it if it’s packaged cleverly. The line was crossed, though, when it spread into invective about his wife, Erica, or when it was directed squarely at Erica in person, as she was following the matches on the grounds. And at the lowest moment of the weekend, someone threw a beer at the McIlroys and it glanced off Erica’s hat.
“No player in modern Ryder Cup history endured the relentless, systematic dehumanization McIlroy faced on Saturday,” Golf Digest’s Joel Beall wrote. “It was one of the most shameful spectacles this event has seen—a sustained campaign of cruelty that should embarrass every golf fan and America.”
Much of what was said was barely repeatable in the media. And the crowds did, at least, provoke the Europeans, and McIlroy specifically, into reacting their way. On Saturday afternoon, as blood alcohol levels crested soaring heights, McIlroy finally broke when he was heckled during his pre-shot routine.
“Guys, shut the fuck up,” Rory said on live TV as he stepped away from his shot. At another moment, he pointed three times at the crowd from the green, saying “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!”
Extra security was added for the last round on Sunday.
I know it’s a lot to ask. But it would be cool for American society if a brief liberation from golf’s normal, stifling decorum didn’t immediately descend into personal abuse about people’s marriages. You can boo the other team on the first tee! You can cheer when they hit bad shots! You can mock their clothes. You can sing songs mocking their clothes, like the Europeans do to the Americans when they’re hosting the Cup. There is a whole acceptable gray area between silence and throwing a beer at a player’s wife. It’s worth exploring!
This apparent strategy of trying to say the worst possible things to the opposing team to rattle them—condoned by the American team with its very selection of Bethpage Black as the venue—also didn’t work. Europe won the Ryder Cup again, 15–13, and McIlroy went 3–1–1 in his matches. It was, however, surprising that the margin was as close as it was, as the Americans put on a furious charge Sunday. There was an hour or two when it looked like the Americans might even have a chance to win the event, were the last few matches to break their way. It was thrilling in the right way, and a reminder of how great the Ryder Cup is when the roars are deafening enough to mute out the morons harassing players and their wives.
McIlroy, meanwhile, was asked in the post-match press conferences Sunday how it felt to hit an approach shot two feet from the hole just after telling those fans to “shut the fuck up.”
“Very fucking satisfying,” he said.