FARMINGDALE, N.Y. — To express their undying loyalties to the home team, some Ryder Cup fans have worn the No. 21 jersey belonging to Mike Eruzione, the most recognizable face of the most profound upset in American sports history.
Forty-five years later, the Miracle on Ice at Lake Placid has a better ring to it than the Miracle on Poa Annua at Bethpage Black. Anything is possible in competition, and maybe Keegan Bradley is destined to become the next Herb Brooks — or at least the next Ben Crenshaw, the 1999 Ryder Cup captain at Brookline who was facing a 10-6 deficit Saturday night when he said, “I have a good feeling about this,” before unleashing on Team Europe the mother of all Team USA comebacks.
Bradley said he will remind his players that his New England Patriots famously won a championship by wiping out a seemingly insurmountable Atlanta Falcons lead. His message to the team: “28-3,” Bradley said. “I was at that Super Bowl.”
But aside from that zillion-to-one shot coming in Sunday, this much is clear: Through two days of competition, from the playing to the coaching to the jeering from the fans, this American effort has been a complete embarrassment.
The Europeans hold a lead of 11 1/2 to 4 1/2, entering the final stage, a dozen singles matches. By the terms of Ryder Cup engagement, a seven-point lead is considered a blowout. No team has ever overcome a deficit that large. No team has ever scored more than 8.5 points in Sunday singles, and the U.S. needs 10 to claim the Cup.
That canyonesque hole the Americans find themselves in is their own damn fault. They have homefield advantage in one of the nation’s most intimidating markets while playing an event that is absurdly difficult for the road team to win.
Oh, and they’re playing it on a public layout that is supposed to represent a working-class grit not often found inside the gates of Country Club America. Bradley, who used to sneak around this place as a St. John’s player, was moved to say of the everyday New Yorkers who frequent Bethpage Black, “We have an extreme obligation to defend their course.”
So far, the Americans have defended Bethpage like the Hessians defended Trenton in 1776.
Scottie Scheffler, left, and Bryson DeChambeau have struggled together and separately. (Harry How / Getty Images)
The Europeans have hit them with bold shotmaking, clutch putting and an urgency and intensity that have blown the host team out of this outsize ballpark. In his morning foursomes match, Jon Rahm was standing in a greenside bunker on the eighth hole when he took a bit of a baseball swing at his ball, which was down in the sidehill rough. Rahm holed the shot with precious little green to work with to take a lead in the match that the Spaniard and his cherished partner, Tyrrell Hatton, never relinquished.
When, exactly, did one of the big-name Americans make a statement like that?
“You need your superstars to perform at their highest,” said European captain Luke Donald.
Rory McIlroy backed away from his ball in the rough at No. 16 to profanely inform the profane hecklers to shut up when he is ready to play. From 149 yards out, McIlroy then launched his approach to within four feet of the cup to seal his foursomes match.
The Europeans answered everything, and the Americans had nothing. The world’s best player, Scottie Scheffler, didn’t score a single point in his four matches and held a team lead for three of his 65 holes. Scheffler hit an inexplicable approach from the 18th fairway in the morning that landed wide right, between the bunkers, which cost his team a chance to halve the match.
Scheffler never hits that shot in a major, or anywhere else on the PGA Tour. But the Ryder Cup has become his kryptonite, just like it was for Tiger Woods.
Bradley couldn’t find Scheffler the right teammate, though that wasn’t the captain’s most damaging mistake. His decision to pair low-energy Harris English with Collin Morikawa was a disaster Friday morning, never mind his decision to send them back out there Saturday despite Data Golf’s analytics that said English-Morikawa was the 132nd best American foursomes team — out of 132 options.
They were red meat for the Fleetwood Mac lions, Tommy Fleetwood and McIlroy. This was straight-up malpractice from Bradley, whose captaincy hasn’t gone any better than that of the man who snubbed him in 2023, Zach Johnson.
But despite the egregious coaching error, this two-day meltdown is on the players. The U.S. horses — Scheffler and Bryson DeChambeau — scored a combined one point in eight matches, and got handled by Fleetwood and Justin Rose in an afternoon fourball match that featured a heated argument among the players, caddies and one vice captain.
It’s the only fight the U.S. showed all day.
Meanwhile, Team Europe’s horses — McIlroy, Rahm and Fleetwood — have amassed 10.5 points in a dozen matches, mocking the bygone prediction made by Bradley: “We are going to go to Bethpage to kick their f—ing ass.”
The hometown crowd has to feel duped. This is Long Island after all, the home office to Jets and Mets fans — people conditioned to getting sold a bill of goods. Some Bethpage fans lashed out in a way that added to the embarrassment of the day.
Fans poured into Bethpage on Saturday. Not all of them behaved properly. (Mike Stobe / Getty Images)
McIlroy and Shane Lowry were subjected to an extreme and personal verbal abuse that required an enhanced police presence. Viktor Hovland was called a disgusting term by a fan during an otherwise quiet moment around one green, causing the gallery to wince and groan.
The Europeans are far too mentally tough to be thrown off their game. Every single time the Americans did something to claim a sliver of momentum, the visitors dropped a hammer on them with a tying putt or some tee-to-green show of precision and poise that surely made an admirer of the most accomplished golfer in the house, Michael Jordan.
On the other side, even when the U.S. team showed Jordan some impressive hang time in the form of Scheffler’s high and perfect approach into the 10th green, the ball smacked hard off the pin and bounded into the rough, giving Fleetwood the W.
Europe won six of Saturday’s eight duels to put itself in position to win the Ryder Cup for the 14th time in the last 20 attempts. And the Americans have offered nothing more than passive resistance.
They had a cause to rally around, too. In the days preceding this matchup, Donald made several mind-game references to money and how Europe didn’t need any to get motivated for the Ryder Cup. He was tweaking the U.S. over the new compensation deal that awards each player $300,000 for charity and another $200,000 to spend as they see fit. Donald knew that some Americans were donating the entire $500,000 to charity, but he didn’t care.
The European captain even suggested that Bethpage fans might be quicker to turn on a struggling home team because of the payments. And it was clear to those listening on the ground the last two days that U.S. fans were discussing those payments, and European fans used them as heckling material.
The Americans could have made Donald eat his words. But they didn’t have the skill or the fortitude to get it done.
So in what was supposed to be an epic Ryder Cup, staged in the greater New York area for the first time in 90 years, the U.S. didn’t bother to show up for the first two days.
The only thing that can save the Americans now is a miracle, and frankly, they probably don’t deserve one.
(Top photo of Keegan Bradley: Andrew Redington / Getty Images)