It's time to give American players a break about their Ryder Cup fans

On Wednesday of Ryder Cup week, Collin Morikawa noticed that the crowds at Bethpage Black felt pretty tame—a lot of us noticed it, actually—and he hoped to find a more intense atmosphere two days later when the match officially began.

"I hope Friday is just absolute chaos," Morikawa said. "I'm all for it. I think it feeds into who we are and the American players. We want it. We want to use that to our advantage. We really have to tap into that. I hope they come strong. Watching all these kids, I know they want autographs. But come Friday, I hope they go crazy."

By Saturday afternoon, it was absolute chaos, but not in a good way—as our Joel Beall and many others documented. Rory McIlroy in particular had to deal with heinous levels of personal abuse from members of the crowd who attacked him and his family in scenes that were both disgraceful and, considering the time and place and cast—America, 2025, drunken golf fans watching their team get routed—entirely unsurprising.

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In the aftermath, it was perhaps only natural that some segments of the media went on an accountability hunt, looking to assign blame beyond the individual fans, and in that way to arrive at a deeper explanation for the behavior. Don Rea Jr., the PGA of America president, was an early scapegoat, offering a response that was justifiably seen as inadequate, and Keegan Bradley took umbrage on Saturday night when a British reporter asked if he and his team bore responsibility for stoking the crowd before play began.

"Ryder Cups are wild," he said, his face tight with barely concealed anger. "I don't appreciate those words that you just said. I know what you're trying to do."

The conversation surrounding the Ryder Cup rowdies hasn’t yet quieted, rived again this week in Japan at the PGA Tour’s Baycurrent Classic. In a pre-tournament interview with Morikawa, another British reporter asked him basically the same question posed to Bradley about his own "chaos" remarks, and whether he felt any "responsibility" for what ensued that Saturday at Bethpage. You can watch Morikawa’s admirably even-keeled response here:

"I think we've taken what I said a little out of context," he began. "I think Ryder Cups are meant to have a lot of energy, right, and I think me saying the word ‘chaos,’ I didn't mean for them to be rude, right? So, like, that's not on me, I believe, for me to take credit for people being rude. I think what I meant was like I wanted energy, right? … So I don't think, you know, me saying one word, everyone listened and then … I don't think I have the power to do that amongst people."

I don't need to elaborate very much on his answer, because it was pretty thorough. The truth is, obviously Morikawa and Bradley were just pushing for a loud, partisan home crowd to give them energy and momentum. That's the nature of home-field advantage in any sport, and to imply that these pre-match exhortations somehow led to the awful fan abuse we saw—or even sought it out, by implication—is deeply unfair to the point of being pushed in bad faith. The American Ryder Cup team wanted a noisy crowd like the Europeans have when they host the match; they didn't want some slobbering moron on his eighth beer to shout a homophobic slur at McIlroy, or to say something nasty to his wife.

Scott Taetsch/PGA of America

Again, there is a human desire to assign blame here and to look for a broader explanation that goes beyond the rogue actions of a few individuals. This is, I think, a correct instinct. However, stopping at Morikawa calling for "chaos" or Bradley for firing up the crowd Friday morning is to arrive at the most simplistic explanation, and one that also happens to be wrong. Even the condemnation of Rea, hapless as his words were, misses the point: It wasn't his fault either.

Sure, there are probably preventative steps that could have been taken, but the difficult truth is that if you want a sweeping theory of why some American fans felt emboldened to say the worst things about McIlroy and others, you'll need to delve into human nature and modern society and other topics that are both more complex and more uncertain. Has the algorithmic dividing wedge and the socially crippling isolation of the smartphone age combined with certain grotesque aspects of current American culture, and even the new ubiquity of sports gambling, to enable especially bad behavior from the fringe elements at an event like the Ryder Cup?

Carl Recine

Maybe. But that's harder to pinpoint and, for a thousand reasons, harder to write about. It's where the truth lies, though, and anyone making a serious effort to diagnose what happened at Bethpage should be looking in that direction. Instead, what we've seen with the Bradley and Morikawa inquisitions is the combination of two other human instincts—the desire for an easy answer and scapegoating as a knee-jerk reaction. Both exist in opposition to a more holistic breakdown on what's actually happening here, which would involve more work and be less conclusive than the more satisfying, visceral impulse to point a finger.

Of course, we don't need to do all that. This is golf. We can move on and accept the shortcomings of the fans in Long Island like we accept a lot of unsatisfying parts of life in 2025—by trying to implement practical solutions and hoping vaguely that someday, somehow, some of this gets better. But let's not succumb to the infantile shortcut, where we pretend to solve the problem by pointing fingers at people who don't deserve it. Collin Morikawa wanted some energy in the crowd. He didn't do this. Keegan Bradley wanted the fans to elevate his team. He didn't do this. To imply otherwise is lazy, unfair, and a disservice to the truth, wherever it might be found.