Brandt Snedeker stood on the first tee at Medinah Country Club on Thursday morning and fired up the crowd before the opening shots of the 16th Presidents Cup. Twelve months earlier, at Bethpage Black, American fans had already answered that call in the worst way imaginable, hurling abuse at European players and their families during a Ryder Cup that left golf’s governing bodies scrambling for damage control. Snedeker’s rallying cry, then, landed less like inspiration and more like a rerun nobody asked for.
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That gap between what Snedeker said and what the moment called for runs through the rest of this year’s Presidents Cup. “Let’s be savages for everybody this week!” the U.S. captain had told the crowd, at an event that’s normally just a lopsided, good-natured showcase for American depth, now playing out in the shadow of last year’s Ryder Cup fallout.
A first-tee announcer was forced out for leading a vulgar chant against Rory McIlroy, and PGA of America president Don Rea Jr. lost his post, in part, for downplaying how fans behaved. Reports out of Bethpage had described the crowd as wild and untamed, going well beyond the usual partisan noise into open cruelty directed at players and their wives. Medinah’s opening day was supposed to test whether golf could reset its own crowd culture, and Snedeker’s opening line briefly threatened to undercut that test before it began.
It didn’t. Fans saved their loudest cheers of the morning for a fleet of helicopters flying overhead, not for anything shouted at the U.S. captain’s urging, Golf Digest reported. Bill Murray drew laughs, not jeers, when he brought out the tournament’s oversized gold trophy at the opening ceremony. When International player Ryo Hisatsune missed a short putt on the second hole, the gallery offered only a few polite groans, the sort a club member might get after a missed three-footer in a weekend fourball.
Fans at Medinah were split on whether that restraint was even necessary. Kurt Batten, a golf fan who traveled in from Kansas City in a stars-and-stripes shirt he’d bought on Amazon, argued the Bethpage rowdiness was simply golf catching up to other sports. “The way it should be,” Batten said, comparing the Presidents Cup atmosphere to the Waste Management Phoenix Open and suggesting “everybody should be allowed to go nuts and scream and yell and have a good time.”
Steve Harry, a fan from the Chicago suburb of Oswego who snapped up tickets as soon as they went on sale, was watching from the eighth hole in a USA hockey jersey, and he saw it differently. He and his regular golf partner, Matt Lowe, worried they’d overdressed for a subdued Midwestern crowd before spotting a fan in a full Statue of Liberty costume near the first tee. Harry admitted the previous year’s Ryder Cup had colored his expectations for how fans should behave.
“I’ll be honest, it was a little embarrassing watching kind of some of the stuff that happened at Ryder Cup, in my opinion,” he said, adding that he wanted to support the American team “without it being over the edge.”
His comparison was to a Tuesday night golf league, where a good shot from either side earns a high-five rather than a heckle.
The turnout mattered too. Thursday’s crowd dwarfed the gallery at Royal Montreal two years prior, filling the first hole almost completely in a city that rarely gets a marquee professional field outside occasional LIV Golf stops. Players’ wives, who had been lightly guarded inside the ropes after a cup of beer was thrown at Rory McIlroy’s wife at Bethpage, were guarded again at Medinah. Between the size of the crowd and how it behaved, Medinah’s fans showed up the way Harry hoped they would, even after their own captain’s opening line suggested otherwise.
There’s another problem hanging over the Presidents Cup, separate from crowd behavior. The Internationals have won only once in the event’s history, and there’s talk that PGA Tour commissioner Brian Rolapp is reconsidering whether a format this lopsided is worth keeping around. Thursday’s four-ball session didn’t erase that history, but it didn’t extend the usual American rout either: the U.S. won three matches to two, with Hideki Matsuyama and Ryo Hisatsune taking their match 3&1 and Tom Kim and S.W. Kim closing out a 3&2 win for the Internationals.
What did get answered, at least for a day, was the question Bethpage left hanging: can golf fans still cheer hard without turning ugly. At Medinah, it was the crowd, not the captain who told them to be savages, that came up with the right answer.