In the middle of a day full of college football on Saturday, I remembered that the biennial Ryder Cup professional men\u2019s golf tournament was taking place and decided to flip over to see how it was going. I knew that the tournament, which pits a hand-selected team of American golfers against a team of Europeans for three days of match-play, was being held at Bethpage State Golf Club on Long Island, and I had a sinking suspicion there might be some spectator issues, but wasn\u2019t prepared for what transpired.<\/p>\n
As described in this phenomenally\u00a0depressing column from The Guardian<\/a> by Bryan Armen Graham, we don\u2019t need to despair that our federal government is embarrassing America on the international stage \u2014\u00a0our citizenry is trying its best to do its worst, as well.<\/p>\n As Graham explains, the folks who paid hundreds of dollars per day to attend the tournament and stand feet from the greatest golfers in the world decided to use that privilege to act like they were instead at WWE Raw and harass the athletes to the point that New York State troopers had to be called in to protect Northern Ireland\u2019s Rory McIlroy halfway through his round on Saturday, a day after the president also decided to fly in and sully the tournament with his presence.<\/p>\n I highly recommend reading Graham\u2019s entire piece, but this was the passage that really punched me in the gut after witnessing the right\u2019s decay since 2015:<\/p>\n …treating Bethpage as a one-off misses the larger point. What happened here didn\u2019t invent the tone of American life so much as reflect what\u2019s been an incremental breakdown in public behavior. The country now lives in all-caps, from school-board meetings that sound like street rallies and comment sections that have spilled into the street. The algorithm bankrolls outrage, the put-down is political vernacular and the culture applauds \u201csaying the quiet part out loud\u201d. In 2025 you can say almost anything in public and be cheered for it (unless you\u2019re Jimmy Kimmel<\/a>). Put a rope line and a microphone in front of that mix and you get exactly what you got at the Ryder Cup: people testing boundaries not because the moment needs them to, but because they\u2019ve been told volume is virtue.\u00a0<\/p>\n Graham notes that \u201cgolf, in the US particularly, has always been a sport for white conservatives,\u201d and being that this was on Long Island I\u2019m guessing that the vast majority of the spectators in the gallery (and quite likely the most vocal of the lot) were in that mold. As a NASCAR fan I see the same group \u2014 though likely a bit lower on the socio-economic ladder \u2014 at multiple races each year.<\/p>\n Now, I\u2019ve always been a bit perturbed by the buttoned-up, lily-white world of pro golf,\u00a0regardless of the slight opening up of the sport that Tiger Woods brought to the sport in the 1990s & 2000s, but while I would like a little more \u201cfun\u201d injected into the game I also understand that the athletes are the show, not the spectators, and that a certain basic level of decorum should be observed by fans.<\/p>\n However, the vulgarity, toxic jingoism and vitriol spewed by the \u201chome fans,\u201d all as their favored American team dug themselves a hole they ultimately couldn\u2019t climb out of on Sunday, showed a global audience that the\u00a0ongoing campaign of hate being conducted by our government\u00a0since January isn\u2019t an anomaly, but is instead simply a symptom\u00a0of an illness that has solidly taken hold of far too many in our country.<\/p>\n Graham nails the diagnosis of the\u00a0illness, one which seems to have infected one-third of the country.\u00a0As for its cure? I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s been invented yet. And if it does exist, I\u2019m sure the current FDA would ban it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the middle of a day full of college football on Saturday, I remembered that the biennial Ryder…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":189087,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[427,99],"class_list":["post-189086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189086"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189086\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/189087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}