A partisan crowd at a pro golf tournament can feel like two different experiences. One player gets cheers, energy, and a crowd that celebrates every birdie. The other faces both the course and the crowd working against him. On Sunday at TPC Sawgrass, Cameron Young experienced both sides.

“It was to the point that Matt looked at me on 18 and said, ‘Do you hate me too?'”

After winning the 2026 Players Championship, Young spoke to Brandel Chamblee on Golf Channel and described a moment that summed up the final round. On the 18th fairway, with the crowd loud, Matt Fitzpatrick turned to him and asked a question that captured the mood.

Young’s response was immediate: “No, we’re friends. We’re on the same TGL team. We’re good.”

Young did not dress up what the galleries were doing. “It was very, very partisan out there,” he told Chamblee, adding that the intensity was “surprising” even by his own standards. Boos greeted Fitzpatrick before shots. “USA! USA!” chants followed Young down the stretch. By the time Ludvig Aberg, who had carried a three-shot lead into the final round, collapsed to a 76 after finding water on consecutive holes, the contest belonged entirely to an Englishman and an American. The crowd had already picked its winner.

Fitzpatrick measured Sunday’s crowd against a higher standard. After finishing with a 68 and taking second place, he was direct about the atmosphere.

“Listen, the crowd, that was literally child’s play compared to Bethpage. If they think that was anything, then they need to reassess. Get yourself up to New York.”

After the 2025 Ryder Cup, Fitzpatrick made it clear that Bethpage was personal. His American wife was put in a difficult spot, and the PGA of America had to apologize for the crowd. Compared to that, a few boos in Florida meant little. Fitzpatrick has played the villain before. At the 2023 RBC Heritage, he beat Jordan Spieth in a playoff with the crowd against him.

What happened at Sawgrass is part of a bigger trend that deserves attention.

Matt Fitzpatrick and the long history of partisan PGA Tour crowds

Golf has seen this before, and TPC Sawgrass has its own record of it. In 2015, Sergio Garcia contended at the same Players Championship while facing a heavily partisan crowd whose loyalties were loud throughout the week. In 2012, Kevin Na was openly taunted over his pace of play during the final round at TPC Sawgrass, the noise growing pointed enough that television commentators addressed it on air. The course has hosted this particular problem more than once.

Away from Ponte Vedra, the pattern keeps reasserting itself at tour stops across the country. The WM Phoenix Open’s par-3 16th operates as its own category of crowd behavior, a stadium hole where disruptions have forced officials to intervene repeatedly over the years. The incidents have been escalating in a measurable way. Earlier in 2026, YouTuber Jack Doherty received a lifetime PGA Tour ban after paying a spectator to disrupt a Canadian golfer’s backswing during the tournament.

Young won The Players Championship with a tap-in par after Fitzpatrick missed an 8-foot putt on 18, collecting $4.5 million and moving to No. 4 in the world. The two embraced immediately after the final putt. Young called Fitzpatrick “a great guy” and “very polite, very kind.” The crowd spent the afternoon treating those descriptions as reasons to boo. Fitzpatrick found it hilarious.