AS I SEE IT COLUMN: MAGA fans disgrace, embarrass USA at Ryder Cup

Golf is supposed to be a gentlemen’s game. Genteel and civil, it’s a game where sportsmanship typically rules the day. But if you tuned in to the Ryder Cup this past Saturday, you saw a circus of otherworldly rudeness. The “ugly American” showed up and made fools of themselves and their country.

It started with a comic who was tasked to warm up the crowd before the day’s matches began. Things quickly spiraled out of control, to the point where fans were chanting “f*** you Rory,” to Europe’s Rory Mcllroy. The MAGA fans then started commenting on the weight of McIIroy’s playing partner, Shane Lowry.

Then, in a display that shatters the most basic rules of common decency on a golf course, American fans started yelling obscenities at Rory in his back swing.

Things got so bad, 24 additional police officers had to be rushed to the golf course to protect McIIroy and Shane Lowry from the disgusting and classless American fans.

But it got worse. Someone threw a beer can at McIIroy’s wife and hit her on the head.

Ryder Cups are known for rowdy, boisterous fans, but what the golfing world witnessed on Saturday – American golf fans debasing themselves, the game of golf and the Ryder Cup itself – went well beyond excited fans cheering the home team. It was a toxic stew of vulgarity and hatred.

Americans were cheering more loudly for European misses than they were for good American shots. Make that make sense.

This kind of appallingly rude and crude behaviour is directly the result of nearly a decade of watching and listening to convicted felon Donald Trump, who should be in jail and not in the White House.

On a daily basis, he calls people names and insults them, whether in social media posts or when there’s a microphone in front of his orange face.

If the president of the United States can ridicule people literally every day of every week, that gives Americans permission to follow suit, to also be bad-mannered and unruly.

Just a couple of days before the Ryder Cup started, the world witnessed Trump disgrace and embarrass himself and America during a completely deranged speech at the United Nations.

Three days later, American Ryder Cup fans played “follow the leader” and made a mockery of everything that is decent and civil about golf.

Thanks to Trump’s incessant name-calling and bullying, public discourse and civility in the U.S. has broken down. There is so much rot in the core of modern conservatism that roughly 30-40% of Americans have fully invested in Trump’s culture of hate and cruelty, and sadly, that ugly reality was on full display at the Ryder Cup.

A headline from British newspaper The Guardian summed it up: “U.S. fan ugliness at the Ryder Cup was merely a reflection of Trump’s all-caps America.”

Joel Beall from Golf Digest wrote “No player in modern Ryder Cup history endured the relentless, systematic dehumanization Mcllroy faced on Saturday. It was one of the most shameful spectacles this event has seen – a sustained campaign of cruelty that should embarrass every golf fan and America.”

But the venom and toxicity didn’t only come the fans. The host golf course shares a huge amount of responsibility for the awful display of boorishness from the American fans. Turns out the golf course just happened to be selling drinks with a rubber ducky, on a day when America needed a miracle to catch the Europeans.

On-course reporters from NBC said some American fans were squeezing their toy rubber ducks, hoping the quacking noise would disrupt the back swing of the Europeans.

Way to be classy America.

Given how tasteless and awful the American fans behaved, it was pure joy to see the Europeans beat Team USA on American soil. If you want to put a huge smile on your face, go to YouTube and type “Europe’s Ryder Cup team sends message to Trump.” You will see all the European players joyously singing in unison “Donald, are you watching?”

It was beyond fitting that Shane Lowry was the one who sank the winning putt for the Europeans.

As the cliché goes “The best revenge is massive success.”