© Paul Childs-Reuters via Imagn Images
The Europeans won the 2025 Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black and the final score, 15-13, looked a lot closer than it felt until Sunday afternoon when the Americans seemed to have a chance to pull off the biggest comeback in Ryder Cup history. Through Friday and Saturday, much of the focus was on the Americans getting slaughtered by the European side and how the vitriol from fans being spewed at the Europeans was crossing the line.
Speaking at the Team Europe post-Ryder Cup press conference, which notably Rory McIlroy didn’t skip like he did all 4 at the PGA Championship because he was rumored to be salty about his driver being deemed ‘non-conforming,’ Rory McIlroy spoke about the fans at the 2025 Ryder Cup.
Rory McIlroy On Ryder Cup Fans Hurling Insults Versus Cheers
To be clear, I’m Team USA to the core. But Rory makes a good point here and one that I wholeheartedly agree with.
Rory’s message about the Ryder Cup fans was clear: support your home team. It wasn’t that they shouldn’t heckle and jeer the opposition, because that is always going to happen to some degree, but the focus should be on rallying behind your squad instead of trying to take pot shots at the European competitors. Here’s the clip:
Couldn’t agree more with this, the MAGAfication of the Ryder Cup had a wider symbolic significance.
— John Jackson (@hissgoescobra) September 29, 2025
‘Support Your Players’
Rory said “come and support your home team. Come and support your team. I think if I was an American, I would be annoyed that … I didn’t hear a lot of shouts for Scottie today but I heard a lot of shouts against me. And it’s like… Support your players.”
Depending on how tapped into the golf world you are on social media, your weekend was likely either filled with posts about ‘Team USA implodes’ or posts about how much American fans were crossing the line. At one point during the Saturday afternoon matches, additional officers were called onto the course to quell the rising anger from American fans and settle everyone down.
But the reality is, European Ryder Cup fans in Rome and every time in recent history the Ryder Cup has been held in Europe have been vicious toward the Americans. No fan base is innocent here. Heckling is part of the Ryder Cup. There is a reason the Europeans practiced wearing VR headsets to simulate the abuse they were expecting (and received) from American fans.
Was it worse this year than in years past? Absolutely. Was it a bad look on the world stage? Of course. But circling back to Rory McIlroy’s comments, American supporters need to shift the paradigm from getting in the heads of the competition to getting in the heads of the people we are there to support.
Look at every sport in America where the home team has a huge advantage and it’s because the home crowd is deafening. You see it in College Football, the NFL, NHL, NBA, and in the MLB Playoffs. The CFB roars drowning out the opposition as a reminder that there are 100K+ fans in the stands rooting for their demise is the mental edge the 50K American fans at Bethpage Black needed to bring to the course.
I didn’t realize how bad the comments were at the Ryder Cup until I started streaming on the NBC Sports app which picked up a lot of the crowd noise versus the TV broadcast. It was all tasteless fat jokes about Shane Lowry and despicable things being chirped at Rory in front of his parents. And that’s just the small snipped of abuse I caught on the stream versus what they were censoring on television.
I won’t purport to have the end-all-be-all fix for supporting the Americans four years from now. But American golf fans, myself included, need to be better organized going into the Ryder Cup. Europe had a whole squad of guys out there passing out leaflets of songs to the European fans to chant. They have a leg up with banter from soccer matches. We don’t bother with that in football here.
Banter is part of their DNA. After the win, Team Europe was chanting “Are you watching? Are you watching? Are you watching, Donald Trump?” and the President actually responded on his Truth Social:
Donald Trump / Truth Social
At the end of the day, it is obvious to me that attacking the European golfers with words didn’t work. What do we lose about heeding Rory McIlroy’s advice and supporting our own guys? Rory and Scottie are friendly, maybe even friends.
Scottie doesn’t want to hear his friend get ripped to shreds by fans even if they’re competing against each other. But Scottie could have used a lot more hype from the fans on Friday and Saturday, we can all agree on that.