Former United States team captains have had mixed reactions to Rory McIlroy’s comments last week at the Ryder Cup.
While Tom Watson posted an apology on behalf of the U.S. for the home fans’ “rude and mean-spirited behavior” toward McIlroy at Bethpage Black, Paul Azinger is questioning whether McIlroy egged some of it on himself.
On Golf.com’s “Subpar” podcast this week, Azinger implied McIlroy needed to pick a lane.
“In the press conference after it’s over, he is saying that I think golf should be held to a higher standard of decorum, but in the meantime he says ‘F you, F you, F you’ in full voice for the world to see,” Azinger said. “He turns around and says to the guy, ‘Shut the F up.’ The guy in the media asks him, ‘How did that feel Rory, to tell him to shut up and then hit it to two feet?’ And he said, ‘It felt pretty f’ing good.’
“And I’m like, which is it, Rory? Is it that golf is held to a higher standard or are you just going to ‘F you’ the fans and act like that’s OK? So, I love Rory, but you can’t say that. You can’t say the fans need to behave better and then in the meantime lay them to waste. You can’t do both. You’ve got to be one or the other.”
McIlroy spoke before and after the Ryder Cup about finding the balance of interacting with hostile fans at the biennial competition. Sometimes, the Northern Irishman said, he has engaged with fans too much, and other times, he didn’t engage enough.
“It was a rough week for all of us,” McIlroy said Sunday night after Team Europe finished off a 15-13 victory. “But at the same time, we shut them up by our performance and how we played, and we tried to — I chirped back a few times because it got to me a few times, but we tried to handle everything that came our way with class and poise, and for the most part, I felt like we did that.”
Europe entered Sunday with an 11 1/2-4 1/2 lead, and it became 12-5 when one match went down as a draw when Norway’s Viktor Hovland withdrew with a neck injury. From that point, Europe needed 2 1/2 more points to clinch the win and it only scored three, as the U.S. made an improbable comeback that fell short.
Azinger took the opportunity to question what that said about McIlroy and his teammates.
“I don’t know what happened in Europe’s team room, but they almost let it get away,” Azinger said. “But they did the slaughtering the first two days. That was a tough pill to swallow. There was a time when I thought it was just going to be the most devastating defeat, and the PGA of America was going to have to restructure everything. And it turned out not to be that way at all. It was actually a bit of a nail-biter.”
Regardless of the final score, the United States’ Ryder Cup operation is still under scrutiny, and not just for its failings on the course for the first two days. The verbal abuse toward McIlroy and his wife was a topic throughout the weekend, and fans often couldn’t get a coherent chant together. A comedian hired to serve as emcee at the first tee stepped down after video showed her encouraging “F– you, Rory” chants.
“Didn’t the PGA of America know when they came here what was going to happen?” Azinger said. “Of course, we all knew. We’ve all been talking about it for 10 years, that this crowd could go crazy. Hey, if the beers weren’t $16 a piece, it could have been worse.”
Azinger, 65, captained the U.S. to a five-point home win in 2008.
–Field Level Media
