It’s Not the One
on the Scoreboard
In-brain soundtrack: “Who’ll Stop the Rain” (Creedence Clearwater Revival)
Can check: Cheerwine Zero Sugar
Golf hole living rent-free in my head: 11th hole at Tain
. . .
The world is an uglier place than it was 10 years ago. Even sports aren’t the escape that they used to be.
Exhibit A: the 2025 Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black — a historically ugly display, and I don’t just mean the United States team’s third loss in the past four events.
The Ryder Cup draws a famously raucous crowd, even by the standards of sports where fans typically are not expected to stop moving during live play. Not long ago, Ryder Cup crowds in the U.S. occupied a rowdy but respectable spot on the bloodlust spectrum somewhere between WrestleMania and the infield at the Kentucky Derby. But as No Laying Up’s Chris Solomon noted on Sunday, something has changed for the worse. On the first tee at Minnesota’s Hatelzine Golf Club in October 2016, thousands of fists flapped those cheap, kid-sized American flags back and forth, chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A!” like it was the last 10 minutes of the 1980 Winter Olympics semi-finals. Actual communal patriotism.
But five years later, when the Ryder Cup returned to American soil at Whistling Straits in Wisconsin, the scene was noticeably angrier. Sadly, Bethpage Black showed that 2021 wasn’t an outlier. It was evidence of something having changed in what behavior many Americans now believe is socially acceptable.
So what happened between October 2016 and now?
Lord, where do you want to start?
Let’s begin with Election Night 2016. And then let’s add a dash of a two-year pandemic where everyone spent months barricaded indoors — afraid, angry, and freebasing social media as their primary source of human interaction. But social media did only what it always does: it exacerbated people’s fear and anger, and it amplified those emotions’ loudest fomenters. The loudest of those fomenters also happened to be the supermassive black hole at the center of the news media’s galaxy. The two cycled endlessly, feeding one another: America’s loudest voice manipulating people’s legitimate anxiety into misplaced anger; those people channeling that rage on platforms that reward anger; empowering that leading voice to amplify the echo that returned his way.
The problem did not begin with the pandemic, of course. But in an era where indecency had already taken power (figuratively and literally), the two began cycling into one another on a feedback loop that drowns out nearly everything else — most of all the voice in the back of all our minds that knows the difference between right and wrong. The result is that American culture finds itself where many American golf fans found themselves at Bethpage: empowered (encouraged, even) to be cruel, ugly, and dehumanizing to anyone within earshot who’s ostensibly “on the other side.”
To be fair, the descent of many Americans into antagonism for their countrymen did not happen in one day — not at Bethpage Black, not at Whistling Straits, and not even on Election Night 2016. For about 35 years, the share of Americans believing that most people can be trusted has hovered around just one-third. A 2020 study found that 80 percent of Americans feel unfavorable toward their partisan opponents. A more recent study showed that most Americans look less favorably on non-Americans preciselybecause they’re not American. And apologies? Out of fashion.
Little did we know that Friday morning’s “Fuck you Rory” chants in the first-tee grandstands would look tame by comparison to what was to come. “How’s your divorce going?” shouted one fan at Europe’s Rory McIlroy. Another hit McIlroy’s wife with a beer. For good measure, other fans broke out some homophobic slurs.
Shocking, yes. But surprising? Why would it be?
Even the most ardent Donald Trump supporter would have to admit that American culture has changed dramatically since his first election. The blame does not rest with his supporters alone. But Democrat or Republican, this cannot continue — and I don’t just mean in 2029 when the Ryder Cup returns to Hazeltine. There are 330 million souls in this country. It is unsustainable for a healthy chunk of our people to treat another healthy chunk as if they’re not people at all. It is not OK to throw beer at women. It is not OK to treat another person cruelly, much less for something as arbitrary and meaningless as the fact that another person is wearing the wrong colored polo shirt. To be clear, I’m not saying that owning a “Make America Great Again” cap makes anyone a bad person. Quite the opposite, and no less than antipathy for the man who brought those caps into fashion. We’ve got to stop treating one another otherwise.
Coincidentally, Donald Trump made a brief appearance at Bethpage on Friday. “We just had the president fly over in his Air Force One,” U.S. captain Keegan Bradley said a few moments later, “so I have a feeling things are going to turn here.”
They turned long before Friday. This weekend shows what that turn looked like. God willing, we can begin turning back before returning to Hazeltine.
. . .