BAAAH-BA-BAAH! It had just gone nine in the morning when the speakers started blasting out Village People’s YMCA. Scottie Scheffler, the world No 1, had arrived on the putting green and everyone was whooping and hollering at him. Scheffler bumped fists with one of his coaches, wrapped another up in a hug and, BAH-BA-BADA-BADA-BAH!, walked on up and across the bridge to the practice ground where there was a crowd of 500 or so waiting.
They started chanting. “YEW-ESS-AY! YEW-ESS-AY!” Scheffler’s a big man. By the time he made it on to the range he seemed to have swelled twice the size.
There are a few hundred thousand reasons why the home team wins two out of three editions of the Ryder Cup. One of them is the nature of the courses, which, like the English language, are the same, but different either side of the Atlantic. The second is that the captains are allowed to tweak the widths of the fairways, the height of the rough and the speed of the greens to suit their own team.
The rest are all paying upwards of $750 to attend. The Ryder Cup always draws the rowdiest crowds in the game. The tribalism, says the US’s Patrick Cantlay, “has become such an integral part of this event, it’s just to be expected”.
But this year, no one is sure what is coming. Donald Trump is due on Friday afternoon and his visit is looming over the tournament like a balloon at the Thanksgiving Day parade.
The only thing anyone can predict with any certainty is that Long Island is going to be gridlocked. The organisers, who are already trying to funnel tens of thousands of fans in and out of the grounds, have been in endless negotiations over the arrangements. The US Open men’s tennis final was held up for the best part of an hour when Trump decided to come along and watch. Organisers here have asked him to delay his appearance until later in the day because they were so worried about the hold-ups caused by his security. The admission conditions include rules against bringing in backpacks, banners and stools, but it is less clear what the policy is on a nuclear football.
Donald Trump went to the US Open men’s singles final at Flushing Meadows in September and the match had to be delayed for an hour. Photograph: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
The European team are so worried about what they are going to be up against that they have been using VR headsets to condition themselves to all the heckling they are expecting. The first day of practice felt like trying to play 18 in the middle of a Maga rally.
Trump got a mixed reception at Flushing Meadows, but US golf is further to the right than my slice and Bethpage is in Trump country. He won Nassau County by 4.2 percentage points in the 2024 election, a 14-point swing from 2020. In 2016, he chose the town for his homecoming rally before the New York primary. He told the crowd how he used to get up at 2am so he could get a tee-time here.
President Trump arrives at the LIV Golf tournament in Doral, Florida, one of his courses. His attendance at Bethpage will lead to heightened security. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Which, like everything else Trump claims in the game, may or may not be true. He also says he has a 2.8 handicap and has won 36 club championships, including six in a single year, achievements that would mean a lot more if he ever registered his scores or played in tournaments at clubs he didn’t own against competitors he couldn’t boot out.
It is one of the sport’s open secrets that he is an inveterate cheat. Rick Reilly wrote a book about it. The only honest thing about Trump’s golf is how much he loves it. Pretty much every player here can tell you a story about how he has called them to talk through their latest victory in excruciating detail.
He will be the first sitting president to attend the competition. George HW Bush went to Valhalla in 2008 and his son turned up at Brookline in 1999, when he was running for the presidency. The US captain, Ben Crenshaw, invited him in to address the team on the Saturday night when they were four-points down. Bush decided to read them William B Travis’s letter from the Alamo: “The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion, otherwise, the garrison are to be put to the sword, if the fort is taken – I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, & our flag still waves proudly from the walls.”
George W Bush (left) attended the Ryder Cup at Brookline in 1999 with his family and spoke to the US team on the Saturday night. Photograph: John Mottern/AFP/Getty Images
By the time Bush was done the team were so worked up that the next day they became the first team to come back from more than two points down before the singles to win the Cup. Along the way, one of the European player’s wives was spat at, the father of another left the course early because of the amount of abuse being thrown at his son and the US team ended up barnstorming the 17th green before José María Olazábal had the chance to make his last putt.
On the BBC, Alistair Cooke said the day would “go down in infamy”. It was, everyone agreed afterwards, one of the most ignominious days in the history of the competition. It also, as Trump might point out, set a TV ratings record that stood for 13 years.
Who knows what Bethpage is going to be like on Friday. The US captain, Keegan Bradley, suggested he was expecting Trump to set himself up by the first tee. “I’m just thrilled he’s going to be here. I really look forward to what that first tee is going to be like with the president on the tee. It’s going to be something everyone will remember for ever.” He is probably right about that, one way or the other.
The US’s huge comeback at Brookline in 1999 included many unsavoury aspects, notably after Justin Leonard holed his putt on 17. Photograph: Richard Sellers/Sportsphoto
Scheffler, who you can only assume is too busy playing to listen to many of his president’s speeches, described Trump as “one of those guys when you’re around him, he does such a good job of feeding confidence into everybody around him. That was one of the things I noticed a lot with the little bit of time I spent with him, he treats everybody the same and treats people with the utmost respect.” Maybe Scottie does a fine line in irony, but my guess is he thinks it is the thing he packs in his bag next to the 3-wood.
There is another irony here. Bethpage Black was built by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, one of 250 municipal courses constructed as part of a drive to open up the game “to a new kind of average golfer” during the New Deal. Roosevelt was a golfer too, club champion, secretary and treasurer at Campobello in Maine. He designed a course especially for people recovering from polio at Warm Springs in Georgia; it has roads and reinforced bridges so patients could be driven in between holes. It is a very different idea of the game to the one we are going to see played out in the next few days.
