It was ironic that, on the day when the European team broke their 13-year Ryder Cup away-win “duck”, US fans bizarrely tried to distract them with “a squeaky duck toy”, said Sky News. But that was the least of the countless insults, slurs and raucous interruptions aimed at Team Europe during golf's premier team competition.
Europe managed to withstand a fierce late comeback from their US hosts at the Bethpage Black course in New York, where “bitterness and toxicity were off the scale”, to win their first Ryder Cup on American soil since 2012.
Golf is “generally a genteel and polite game”, loaded with “many unwritten rules of etiquette”, said CNN, and the scenes at Bethpage this weekend will have led many to conclude that its fans have gone way “too far”.
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‘Anything now goes’
One of the most historic competitions in sport has been “appropriated by a nauseating coarseness”, said The Times, giving it the air of the “stag party from hell”. As the weekend drew on, the wife of Masters-winner Rory McIlroy was “called a whore” and had drinks “thrown at her”, and the wife of his teammate Shane Lowry received “dog’s abuse”.
The tone was set early, and not just by fans attending the event. On Saturday, MC Heather McMahan, a comedian and actor, led repeated chants of “Fuck you, Rory!” on the first tee. She later apologised and stepped down from her role for the rest of proceedings.
Europe’s fans are not squeaky clean. They are known to drink a lot and cheer bad shots but it would be “disingenuous” to try to compare their behaviour to the “bile of Bethpage”, said The Times. American fans’ “misguided belief” that “anything now goes” risks marring the “beauty of the Ryder Cup”.
The “ugliness” of US fans’ behaviour was symptomatic of a darker, tribal thread running through “Trump’s all-caps America”, said The Guardian. Hordes of spectators gathered round the greens, bellowing “YEW-ESS-AY! YEW-ESS-AY!” at every European falter, drifting from “partisan into venomous” as the contest developed.
The atmosphere at Bethpage had long been trailed as a “snarling, uniquely American cauldron” that would “rattle Europe”. But “the idiots took it literally”, hurling “homophobic slurs” and “boos during backswings”, and aiming “cheap shots dripping with tiresome stereotypes” at McIlroy in particular.
‘Bedlam at Bethpage’
You would be hard pressed to find anywhere in the world with “obnoxious golf fans quite like America”, said The Independent. And, combined with a “sincerely troubling security presence”, this year’s Ryder Cup match turned into a “travelling bear pit”.
Men “with hats and guns emerged through the trees” mid-round as if they were “quashing an insurgency”. As Lowry celebrated Europe’s win on the 18th green, two fans were “hauled out of the grandstand by police for fighting”, providing a “fitting end to a day of bedlam at Bethpage.”
Organising body the PGA of America did beef up security for the final day, with police officers trailing the players and messages of a “zero tolerance approach to abusive shouting” flashing up on the big screens, said the BBC. But in future competitions, “enforcement has to be swift, visible and consequential or it becomes permission by another name”, said The Guardian. “You can fill a grandstand without emptying your standards.”
