Bryan Armen Graham at The Guardian:
By the time Europe finished the job, finally, on Sunday, the golf had the last word. But until the thrilling denouement, the lasting memory of this Ryder Cup threatened not to be a single swing of the club so much as the ugly backdrop: galleries that drifted from partisan into venomous and the organizers who let the line slide until it snapped…There’s a difference between atmosphere and interference, and Bethpage spent too much of the weekend blurring the two. Boos during practice swings and the sing-song “YEW-ESS-AY! YEW-ESS-AY!” after a European miss were tiresome, but survivable. What crept in on Saturday was different: insults aimed at players’ wives, homophobic slurs, cheap shots at [Rory] McIlroy’s nationality dripping with tiresome stereotypes, gleeful reminders of Pinehurst the moment McIlroy crouched over anything inside five feet.
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Sunday brought a tacit admission that the line had been crossed. The first-tee master of ceremonies, the comedian Heather McMahan, stepped down from her role after video showed her leading a chant of “F— you Rory!” on Saturday morning. The PGA announced her departure and apology before the singles. If the MC is amplifying the worst instincts in the building, that’s not “energy”; it’s an institutional failure.
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What happened here didn’t invent the tone of American life so much as reflect what’s 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 “saying the quiet part out loud”. In 2025 you can say almost anything in public and be cheered for it (unless you’re Jimmy Kimmel). 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’ve been told volume is virtue