Amid the chaos that led many to label the 2025 Ryder Cup as the most debauched sporting event in some time, our man in the stands fully embraced the party.
Tyler King November 5, 2025
I left the circus grounds of Bethpage State Park Golf Course at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, having spent 30 hours over two days at one of the most anticipated sporting events of my lifetime. My assignment was to really understand the Ryder Cup experience — a sort of perverse ethnography in sports fandom that we all knew, given this year’s location in New York, was going to test all boundaries of basic human decency. Indeed, by the afternoon session on Day Two, with the visiting Euros throttling the hosts, the lion-tamers had long since given up on any semblance of order and fled, and the animals were now running wild.
As I stood in the miles-long line for a shuttle bus to the Long Island Rail Road, which would take me into Brooklyn, where I was staying, I felt like I was in the middle of a New Orleans state funeral — the majority cursing the gods for being so cruel and their enemies continuing their vicious death chants of “Olé!” The mood was so twisted and hard to describe that I decided I should take one final video, in the hopes it could better capture the paradox of this solemn, yet rabid, scene. To my horror, however, I opened my phone’s camera app to find it set to selfie mode and the haggard, unfamiliar face staring back at me set in motion a truly nauseating wave of shame and panic.
“Good god, I’m one of them,” I thought.
I looked more like a weary soldier leaving the Front than someone who had been at a golf tournament, and I will probably pay thousands in therapy bills to deal with the lifelong shell shock. You see, since my task was to infiltrate and report on the fandom of bothsides, I had to be more spy than diplomat in this fight.
Thankfully, it was immediately obvious that the American and European fans didn’t only share the basic syntax of the King’s English, but the similarly foul, yet mostly hilarious, tongue of beers and barbs. As a lifelong fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Toronto Blue Jays, I have spoken this language since birth, so it wasn’t hard to pretend to be one of them. I believe I succeeded, but only at the hefty price of having two beers in my hands at all times and constantly lying through my teeth that I believed Team U.S.A. could still win this thing.
It’s funny, though. I went to Bethpage intending to cheer for the European team, mostly due to its embarrassingly lucrative betting line of +160, which I hammered with the brunt of my modest savings before leaving Canadian soil. But in that shuttle bus line, seeing the utter despair in all these American faces, I realized I was genuinely hoping for a U.S.A. comeback. That the brash jubilance of the Euro supporters only got worse with the sight of every American tear made me feel sorry for my New York friends.
And then I heard it. “F**k the Bluuuue Jaaaays!” There was no doubt as to the identity of my verbal attacker, as his words were punctuated with the unmistakable long vowels of someone born on a Bronx Park bench. He was also wearing a Yankees shirt and clearly wanted to punch the Jays hat off my head. “Yankees suck,” now seems like an embarrassing comeback, although prescient given the postseason result between the two teams. Yet after two long days, it was all I had left. Plus, there was nowhere to run if this turned violent, and I felt a second rush of panic when the chorus of Bronx jeers told me I had retorted too loudly. So you can imagine my surprise when this Yanks fan simply laughed and said, “I’m just messing, buddy. Helluva a season for the Jays. Hey, you want a water? You look like you’re hurting.”
What on God’s green-fairway’d earth was going on? And what kind of dirty trick was this guy playing? He was right, though. I was hurting. The beers that had won me so many new friends had started to turn against me, and I took the offering of water before I had time to consider the very real possibility that it might be poison. But of course it wasn’t poison, and this Yanks fan was no enemy. He was just Good Guy Nick from New York.
Reflecting on my trip into the Dragon’s Lair, the Belly of the Ryder Cup Beast at Bethpage’s torture-chamber that is the Black Course, I had countless encounters with people like Nick. Despite what you’ve heard about the New York fans — that they were too quiet, then too loud, then criminally insane — none of this resonated when I was in the stands and actually trying to push them to their edge, hoping for a glimpse of the infamous American Boogey-Fan.
I now see that was always going to be my dirty trick. Worse yet for a writer, it was also an unoriginal one as every golf commentator in the world made the crowd their scapegoat story the second Europe’s domination presented them with little else.
Not to say they were completely wrong and let me make this abundantly clear so you don’t accuse this magazine or writer of supporting the throwing of beer-filled projectiles: the conduct of some 2025 Ryder Cup fans, and the abuse taken by certain European team members and associates (and even spouses) was indeed a dark stain. It has no place in golf, or in any sport.
But I have to be honest in my reporting, too, because no matter how much Blue Jays gear I wore or how high I held my Wayne Gretzky Team Canada sweater above my head or how many European hands I blatantly high-fived in front of American faces, no drinks were thrown in my direction. Instead, I met lots of people like Nick … although I’m not Rory McIlroy and I recognize he has a very different take.
Not to say they were completely wrong and let me make this abundantly clear so you don’t accuse this magazine or writer of supporting the throwing of beer-filled projectiles: the conduct of some 2025 Ryder Cup fans, and the abuse taken by certain European team members and associates (and even spouses) was indeed a dark stain. It has no place in golf, or in any sport.
But I have to be honest in my reporting, too, because no matter how much Blue Jays gear I wore or how high I held my Wayne Gretzky Team Canada sweater above my head or how many European hands I blatantly high-fived in front of American faces, no drinks were thrown in my direction. Instead, I met lots of people like Nick … although I’m not Rory McIlroy and I recognize he has a very different take.
For what it’s worth, my initiation to New York fandom started as soon as I entered the grounds at 7:30 on Friday morning. The first golf shot I saw was a tee ball from U.S.A.’s Patrick Cantlay on Hole 5. He took — and I have the video to prove it — a full 50 seconds from when he addressed the ball to when he took the club back. Even I felt it hard to keep quiet for that long, and it was clear Cantlay stretched everyone’s patience too thin. The booming roar of a New Yorker screaming, “TAKE YOUR HAT OFF!” rang out the second Cantlay’s ball was finally in the air.
I didn’t see another golf shot for almost two hours, which is the curse and, in my opinion, the blessing of attending the Ryder Cup. With only four matches on the course during Friday and Saturday’s morning and afternoon sessions, it’s impossible to watch more than a few shots at a time. If you don’t secure a viewing position at a hole three hours before groups arrive, you won’t see anything but the backs of 2,000 sweaty heads when you finally get there.
But the anticipation and build-up to the event is precisely what makes the Ryder Cup different. And awesome. Unfortunately, that’s also a major reason why some fans couldn’t help but froth like dogs when they finally caught a glimpse of McIlroy, the leader of the foreign invaders. They’d been waiting all day to say their piece and by god they were going to say it. And while they awaited that opportunity, there was little for them to do but drink, an action I can’t necessarily condemn. Right or wrong, some of my greatest memories from attending the 2025 Ryder Cup are of drinking beers on the grass in front of a videoboard or in the grandstands and just following the mob rule. Anything to stay entertained.
And entertained I was. It was in the lowly commoner’s beer line where I met Kelli and Lauren. They were wearing “I Like Big Putts” hats and could recite the up-and-down percentages of every American player. Their language was so foul and full of innuendo that I can’t in good conscious recite what we talked about here, but I don’t remember laughing harder than when they taught me how to shorten the queue by “breaking wind.” When that didn’t go as planned, the three of us entered separate lines in the hopes one would move fast. When it was apparent the people in mine couldn’t make up their minds, which was curious considering the options were “Big Michelob” or “Little Michelob,” Kelli let me join hers at the front.
“Oh, he’s with me!
Where have you been honey?”
My loudest cheer of the day was therefore not watching Justin Thomas roll in a 20-footer or Jon Rahm pipe a 320-yard drive, but when I ran into these ladies again a few hours later. Kelli and Lauren introduced me to their much larger group, including their husbands — boo! — and we all hung out together. I had another good laugh when one of their friends showed up late and was mercilessly ridiculed for wearing all black. “You couldn’t even find a red bracelet?” … “He’s a European in camouflage!” And so on. (We have plans to reunite in Buffalo for a Bills game.)
Since Kelli and Lauren showed me that it was outside the ropes where the real magic of being at the Ryder Cup manifests, I didn’t bother trying to see any golf before 9 a.m. when I returned Saturday morning. Eventually, with two Big Michelobs in hand, I found one of the last seats in the public grandstand by the 15th green at 10:15. The first group had just made the turn, so I had plenty of time to kill.
And that’s where I met Brent and Jack, two more American, filter-less friends, although you wouldn’t know it from their constant bickering (think “bombs” rather than “needles”). They may have secretly hated each other, but they embraced this like-minded Canadian, and I passed the time by getting in on their makeshift betting pool, which soon involved our entire row. With a videoboard beside us, there was no shortage of action, and for the next three hours people in our section gambled on everything from who would hit a shot closest to the pin to which caddie would place his player’s bag on the ground first. (The bet paid three-to-one if the caddie laid the bag on its side.)
It might have been the lopsided score, but these true-blue Americans weren’t shouting obscenities at the Euros like the lunatics you heard on TV. Rather, they were screaming at the loopers — sometimes the U.S. ones — to “DROP THE F***ING BAG!” By the last match, half the people in this grandstand were calling Brent “Bankloans” after he put his money on the American side four times in a row and lost. Our little game seemed to give him — and all of us — more heart palpitations than the one between the U.S. and Europe.
My whole weekend could be told through anecdotes like these. Sure, a verbatim transcript of everything that was said over the Ryder Cup’s three days would cause a national uproar, ending with it being ceremonially burned in at least 40 states for inciting insurrection. But context matters, and words and actions alone rarely tell the whole story. The fact that there was always a laugh or wry smile tacked on to even the most depraved insult was enough for those of us in the stands to know we were among friends.
It’s a shame that the reason we love such passionate fandom is also why we sometimes must condemn it. The proverbial line between witty banter and unconscionable obscenities can be fickle. Its location is often undefinable until the very moment someone crosses it, at which point the demarcation appears blatantly obvious. However, after being in that environment, it is now apparent that the blame and ire for crossing the line cannot only be directed at the fans. For years now, Ryder Cup organizing committees can’t seem to decide if they want the spectacle to be more like Coachella or the Masters.
The New York fans, as a whole, are now being vilified simply because they took the propaganda machine too literally: that Uncle Sam had been embarrassed at the 2023 Ryder Cup at Rome’s Marco Simone, that the Euros were dancing on their foursomes graves and that 2025 was a must-win scenario, else the Americans’ futility risk turning the event into a farce. But who fed them these narratives in the hopes they would heed the call to war? And what did they expect would happen if the war on the course turned into a vicious slaughter, as it did through the first two days? These New Yorkers were never going to take it lying down, and if the players couldn’t defend their country’s honour, the fans were going to do it for them.
But before you start clamouring for the Ryder Cup to mimic the decorum of Augusta National, there is an important trade-off to understand: I’ve had many friends and colleagues attend the Masters, and while everyone always says it was one of the best times of their life, no one has ever used the word “fun” to describe it. They say it was “majestic” or “spiritual” or “awe-inspiring.” These words are very different than the ones you will hear about the 2025 Ryder Cup, which was “insane” and “wild” and “unbelievable.”
And, most importantly, “fun.”
Clearly, some fans have a different definition of that word than me, and that’s precisely the problem: we need to come together and collectively decide, once and for all, what the Ryder Cup actually is. Until that time, it will remain open to different people’s interpretation of fun, and for some that will be perverse.
That, I think, is the whole point of this story. While some may hate what the Ryder Cup has become — an event where golf is starting to play second fiddle to the riotous atmosphere in which it’s played — I’ve tried to give you one argument as to why it’s a party worth defending. And I’m happy to put my money where my mouth is.
After everyone else has cast the crowd from Long Island into disgrace, to rot in the shallow depths of sporting hell alongside such notorious fandoms as the Inner City Firm from West Ham — the inspiration for the film “Green Street Hooligans” — I would still trade every bloody dollar I won off Bankloans Brent for another day in that cauldron.
And if you are going to blanketly brand all the fans that weekend as nothing but a bunch of New York trash, then you’ll have to throw this Canadian into the dustbin with them. I know a lot of people who wouldn’t have a problem doing that, but they should note I’d be landing squarely on the heads of good people like Brent, Kelli, Lauren and Nick. People who, when you think about it, will always make the Ryder Cup whatever it is.
