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In 2021, the Ryder Cup inaugurated a sportsmanship award named after veteran golfers Jack Nicklaus and Tony Jacklin. The American and Englishman agreed in 1969 to draw their singles match in order to ensure that each team finished with the same points total.
Such grace and integrity is a far cry from the Maga-tinged melee at this year’s tournament. The past weekend featured a cameo from the US president, the American captain leading a Donald Trump tribute dance, and crowd behaviour vile enough to shake even the most jaded golf observers, many of whom said they could not even repeat the abuse they observed from American fans.
The ugly scenes on Long Island’s Bethpage Black course included repeated vulgarities hurled at European players and even a beer thrown at the wife of Rory McIlroy. On two occasions, the otherwise insouciant Northern Irishman responded to taunts with his own profane clapbacks.
This fiasco is years in the making. For the first several decades since its founding in 1927 as a friendly exhibition, Team USA dominated the biennial competition against peers from across the pond. But then came 1979, when Great Britain and Ireland were allowed to take in continental European participants, just as these countries produced its greatest golfing generation: Seve Ballesteros, Nick Faldo and Bernhard Langer, the leading trio. By the late 1980s, Europe had captured successive Ryder Cups, with the fevered competition reaching a new crescendo in the 1991 “War by the Shore” match on the South Carolina coast.
Americans dominated individual golf. But in quirky head-to-head “match play”, its transcendent but lone wolf superstars Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson struggled to find similar magic. In the 2002 clash, Scotsman Sam Torrance encapsulated the esprit de corps of the European side when remarking that while Team USA “may have a Tiger, I’ve got 12 lions”.
By the 2010s, America had slightly improved its fortunes but hadn’t secured the cup on European soil since 1993. The Europeans were somewhat better across the pond, but had been in a dry spell since 2012. A new challenge emerged: which team could prevail in enemy territory.
And while most of Europe’s stable of Grand Slam winners now play full-time on the American tour and reside in South Florida, an occasional blood feud endures, most notably that between McIlroy and Bryson DeChambeau. DeChambeau, known for his biceps and booming drives, plays for the Saudi-backed LIV league and is close with the Trump family. He has also gained a following among young men who watch his golf stunt YouTube channel bringing a coarser, if energetic, demographic to the staid links.
The Europeans proved magnificent in the team portion of the competition on Friday and Saturday, racing out to a near insurmountable lead by the time the singles matches launched on Sunday. With few birdies to cheer, the American fans were left to scream banal slurs at the European players and their families.
Remarkably, a comedian hired by the hapless Ryder Cup co-owner, the Professional Golfers’ Association of America — which had pulled off the dual feat of neither fielding a competitive US team nor ensuring a secure environment for the visiting squad — formally led a profane chant directed at McIlroy over a loudspeaker.
Amid the broader pall over the tournament, England’s nice bloke Tommy Fleetwood took home the Nicklaus-Jacklin award. The aftermath of the matches was dominated by the decorum debacle instead of a historic European victory or a near miracle US comeback.
“My fear about the inexcusably vitriolic behaviour by some spectators at the Ryder Cup is that a few too many Americans these days have learnt from an increasingly ugly political culture that being loud, stupid and hateful is a credible way to act in public,” said Bradley Klein, an American golf historian.
As for the possibility of healing, McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler, the American top-ranked player in the world, are jointly hosting an exhibition in December. Where? A Trump golf club in Florida.
sujeet.indap@ft.com
