[Photo: YouTube/Heather McMahan]

Any comedian who’s stood on a stage in front of 20 or 2,000 people knows the risk they take when the lights go on. They have no idea how it’s all going to go down. Will the audience laugh uproariously? Lurking in the shadows, is there a drunk heckler who won’t shut up? Or probably the worst of all: Will they shrug and snore?

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Heather McMahan, a veteran American comedian with thousands of kilometres logged on the road, knew the stakes when she was hired by the PGA of America to be a first-tee emcee for last week’s 45th Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black on Long Island. As a big fan of the game—“The Ryder Cup’s my thing; golf is my sport”—she was thrilled to accept, even though her husband thought she was a little bit nuts in taking on an assignment that would put her in front of thousands of New Yorkers for a sporting event that is wildly charged, highly partisan and increasingly tense.

McMahan was all in, until the event and the crowd and one very “stupid” mistake on her part made it a complete nightmare she’s going to re-live for years.

Early on Saturday morning, in front of a full grandstand with thousands of people, a sing-song chant went up of “F—k you Rory.” The Irish golfer, Rory McIlroy, had already been the target of ridicule and vulgar comments from the gallery on Friday, and things figured to get amped up on the weekend after Europe took a commanding early lead.

Video and audio from that morning show that McMahan did not start the chant and repeated it one time into her microphone over the public address system. But the story blew up throughout the day as McIlroy and all of Europe’s players endured various levels of abuse, and McMahan ultimately decided not to return on Sunday.

They have someone MCing the first tee trying to lead chants and it is not working /resulting in boos. A De-Cham-beau led chant lasted couple beats before turning into a “F U Rory” which also came over the mic. pic.twitter.com/rxewFa9cAj

— Brendan Porath (@BrendanPorath) September 27, 2025

McMahan offered a personal apology to McIlroy on Saturday, but the furore over the situation only grew, and McMahan has been the subject of hateful comments on all forms of social media ever since, across both sides of the Atlantic.

During her own podcast, “Absolutely Not,” McMahan spoke for more than 30 minutes about the experience—about the chaos created on the first tee, how confused she felt, the disappointment in herself for participating in the chant, the horrible messages she received afterward, and how it felt for a sporting event to spiral out of anyone’s control.

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“The Ryder Cup is feral. The fans were feral. It was a brutal environment,” McMahan said on the podcast, which she began with a half-joke to her new listeners: “You’re probably a 55-year-old Irish man, and you’re very angry with me right now, which you’re allowed to be.”

There is so much to unpack from McMahan’s comments that we figure it’s best to take it one bite at a time, in mostly her own words.

The buildup

McMahan explained the Ryder Cup to listeners who might not understand it, and added, “Tensions are high, but it’s fun and it’s funny, and everyone’s kind of like rowdy and obnoxious, but it’s always been in a positive way. And, unfortunately, this year, I think, it turned pretty sour.”

She described all of the features of the first tee early in the morning—the sun coming up, the energised crowd, the sound of those first drives being struck.

“It’s a magical golf moment. So, I was hired to entertain at the first tee and the first Friday we were just kinda getting our feelings of … figuring out the crowd and what we needed to do and what was going on and what the energy was and how to read the room and how to get the mics to work right.

“… And then Saturday came and we came out full throttle. The word I had gotten from the team was we need to get everybody hyped. Team America’s coming out. We need to be so outta control, so full throttle in cheers and chants and get everybody to truly pump up the team and get the energy going.”

McMahan said she tried to get the crowd to do positive chants about the American players, but many people booed her.

“These guys don’t want anything to do with it. They’re, like, ‘This is New York; we want to get rowdy.’ And that’s the way it went. The crowd started to get really fratty [frat house], really intense, really quick. And I don’t want to speak for everybody in the crowd … there were so many wonderful people there that were being lovely.”

Joining in

Then McMahan made a terrible decision. She joined in for one round of the “F—k you” chant.

“I made the absolute horrible mistake of saying it back to them once. And if you watch the video, I’m kind of like laughing to myself, like, ‘F–k you, Rory?’ I’m just, like, what? And the media took that, spun it and said that I had started all of these chants. I would just like to say … I did not like the energy and the vibe from when that started to happen. I will take full responsibility and sincerely apologise to Rory, Team Europe, for saying that—it was so foolish of me.

“I did not start the chant. I would just like that narrative to get out there. I did not start it.”