Rory McIlroy’s PGA Championship hopes had been all but dashed when he put the ball into the bunker with his third shot on the par five 16th at Aronimink on Sunday.
McIlroy was already running out of time to catch Aaron Rai. So that mistake seemed to confirm that he would not be lifting the Wanamaker Trophy for a third time.
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Some may have assumed that had an impact on what happened next, with the Northern Irishman turning around and calling for one spectator to be removed from the golf course.
Rory McIlroy defended over having a spectator removed from the PGA Championship
It was not entirely clear what got to McIlroy. But the television pictures appeared to show that a ‘USA’ shout prompted the 37-year-old to take action.
On the face of it, it appeared to be an incredibly poor look from McIlroy. It looked petulant when you consider that he is not the only player to deal with that particular taunt since the Ryder Cup.
However, it seems that it was actually the final straw for McIlroy after some relentless heckling.
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Speaking on The Smylie Show, producer Charlie Hulme revealed that those particular spectators had seemingly made it their mission to knock McIlroy off his game.
“A lot of people talking on Twitter about Rory’s interaction with the fan on 16. He turns around and yells at him and people are saying, ‘how soft is Rory? The guy yelled USA’,” he said.
“Let me tell you something, Jaxon Brown and I were out at the ninth hole, on the left side of the ninth hole of Aronimink, and Rory’s walking up the fairway after hitting his drive, and it’s these two dum-dums. One of whom looks like a bad sketch of a neanderthal. The other whom he was too nondescript to even care about. And they’re yelling at Rory the entire way up. ‘You suck Rory. You’re terrible. Just go home. You’ve got no shot’.
Photo by Richard Heathcote/Getty Images
“And someone speaks up because I didn’t want to because I didn’t want to get my media badge revoked because, you know, your boy runs a little hot sometimes. So I just didn’t want to, I didn’t want to bark up that tree. These kids are calling them fat and this and that. So who knows? They could have been heckling Rory for the first nine holes and we missed it.
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“And it probably took them the next, however many seven because guess what? Guess who the the person was who was yelling Rory on 16 and got kicked out – that very same guy that I wish I had confronted or security do something with.
“So when we hear people criticising on Twitter, on social media, calling these players out, there was often more context to these things. And so seeing it up close and personal and seeing what Rory was going through every hole, this moron walking around, and by the way, if this guy’s listening or whatever, I want you to go take your golf clubs, donate him to The First Tee, probably the first good thing you’ve ever done in your life and never play golf again, all right? Because I don’t want people like you around a game that I love.
“It’s terrible. The guy who’s yelling at this guy who tried to confront him, he said, ‘dude, it’s a sporting event. What do you expect?’ It’s not what we do in the game of golf. all right? If you’re going to go to a sporting event, there’s two teams, there’s a team rooting for, the team you’re rooting against. You want to root against that team, that’s fine. Ryder Cup, I know we took a little too far last fall, but there’s still that team element. You’re going to go to a golf tournament. That’s not the way you do it, all right? I’ll get off my soapbox now.
“I had to get that in the notes because I saw these things about Rory, and it’s like people don’t have the full context. People are going to say Rory’s so soft and this and that. Well, you didn’t really know what happened out there.”
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There has been a big improvement since the Ryder Cup, but there is more work to be done
It was a reminder of just how remarkable McIlroy’s performance at the Ryder Cup was.
The game has rarely seen scenes like the one on Saturday afternoon, when McIlroy found himself refusing to play on until the abuse stopped.
It prompted Tom Watson to express his disgust at the sections of the American support who crossed the line. And many hoped that it would prove to be a turning point.
The Ryder Cup should absolutely be tribal. It is an event like nothing else in golf, and the fan support plays such a large part in that.
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But there is a line that was crossed by quite some way at Bethpage.
Thankfully it seems that the vast majority of those inside Aronimink this past week behaved themselves. But clearly, it is going to be incredibly difficult to stop all of those who want to take things way too far.