I don’t watch a lot of golf these days. I used to play a little, as a kid, but I drifted away from it in my teens, in retrospect probably out of a sense of the sport as incompatible with the punk rock ethos and aesthetic around which my youthful identity was by then starting to cohere. (I did take a summer job at Mount Juliet during college, though, where I worked in the hotel during an international golf competition. I can’t say it was a formative experience. Aside from a general sense that I was an abysmal service worker, more smoke break than man, I retain only one memory of that time, albeit a vivid one: bringing room service to Tiger Woods in his suite, and being very conscious that, as I nervously laid out his club sandwich and pot of tea, he was sprawled on the couch in his boxer shorts, watching himself play golf on television.)
Watching the footage of last weekend’s Ryder Cup competition – in which the European team beat the Americans at New York’s Bethpage Black course – I briefly wondered whether my teenage conclusions about the incompatibility of golf and punk rock might have been based on a false premise, because the behaviour of the American crowd might not have seemed out of place at CBGB’s in its heyday.
Although, in truth, the sort of behaviour the US fans were engaging in – chanting “f**k you Rory” at the European star player as he squared up to the ball; hurling personal abuse, and at one point a plastic glass of beer, at his wife Erica – would have got you thrown out of any punk venue I myself ever frequented.
In a sense it stands to reason that there might be an edge of hostility with this particular crowd. New Yorkers are not, at the best of times, known for their genteel adherence to interpersonal etiquette. The competition’s match-play format, whereby players earn a point for every hole they win against their opponent, and the fact that it pits two teams against each other, sets it apart from most professional golf tournaments. Ryder Cup crowds, specifically American crowds, have historically tended to be more demonstrative than fans at typical golf competitions.
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In 1999, when the cup was held at Brookline just outside Boston, Colin Montgomerie was mercilessly taunted by drunken US fans – about, among other things, his weight, and his marriage problems. Expressing his disgust at the crowd’s behaviour, European team captain Mark James said “the depravity of some of the insults from the crowd had to be heard to be believed. My wife was spat at, and Andrew Coltart was misdirected in search of a ball”. James, of course, was right to be disgusted, although you might need a more nuanced understanding of golf etiquette than mine to not find the implied equivalence of these two transgressions at least a little bit funny.
So the behaviour of the US fans last weekend didn’t exactly come out of a clear blue sky. In fact, Luke Donald, the European captain, gave his team VR headsets to prepare them for the experience of playing in front of a hostile American crowd; when asked by a sports journalist what sort of stuff the VR fans were shouting, McIlroy said: “You don’t want to know. Not for publication.”
Whatever it was, it obviously wasn’t as bad as what he (and his wife) wound up getting from IRL American fans, which he characterised as “unacceptable”, and which prompted him to reflect, in the wake of eventual victory, that “golf should be held to a higher standard than what was seen out there this week”.
This last view seems to be one that typifies much of the response to last weekend’s scenes. Although I’m not, as I said, any longer much of a golf fan, I was taken aback to see such outright loutishness from the galleries. Is this the way things are going with the sport? Is golf thuggery a thing now? How long before we see football-style ultras detonating crimson flares and smoke bombs along the 18th fairway, Portmarnock casuals beating rival hooligans with nine irons in the car park of the K Club?
[ ‘Throw out the Irish trash’: I’ve been to 15 Ryder Cups but this was a new lowOpens in new window ]
But actually, how surprising is it, really? Unquestionably the planet’s most famous golf enthusiast is Donald Trump. A fair portion of his wealth, at least before political power opened up multiple alternative revenue streams, came from the acquiring and developing of golf courses. He is also almost as enthusiastic about playing the game as he is about making money off it. (The American writer Mark Singer, who wrote an indelible 1997 profile of Trump for The New Yorker, memorably referred to his “placid ignorance of more or less everything that is not ass, money or golf”.) His ardour for the sport was not even dampened by a failed 2024 assassination attempt on his own golf course in Florida’s West Palm Beach, in which a guy lay in wait for him with an assault rifle off the sixth fairway. Again, I only have a hazy sense of the intricacies of golfing etiquette, but I’m confident that this is severely frowned upon.
There was, no question, a Trumpian note of nastiness and cruelty to some of the abuse that was thrown at the European golfers by the US crowd. As a spectacle, it was in keeping with, and reflective of, the ongoing degradation of civic life in that country. McIlroy in particular had to contend with not just anti-Irish insults – “Throw out the Irish trash!”, “Leprechaun!” – but also, more weirdly and troublingly, persistent homophobic slurs. And despite a small handful of high-profile non-white players over the years – Vijay Singh and Tiger Woods probably the most prominent among them – golf is not a diverse sport, in terms either of its players or its fans.
With their Old Glory suits and their blaring bigotry, the crowd at Bethpage last weekend looked at times indistinguishable from a Maga rally – even before Trump himself helicoptered in to join them. It’s tempting to say that the whole thing felt surprisingly close to that other sport with which Trump has been most closely associated, pro wrestling. But that would be a disservice to WWE fans, many of whom seem to have a deeply nuanced understanding of wrestling’s layers of theatrical complexity, and are in fact a good deal more sophisticated than outsiders give them credit for. The Ryder Cup crowd, on the other hand, were just, well, plain old golf hooligans – a term not nearly as self-contradictory as it might seem.
