Part II !of Brian Sommer’s four-part essay on what the World Cup, Shinnecock Hills, and the Long Island Crowd Exposed
By Brian Sommer
There is contradiction that might be even more revealing than the TV ratings. Golf wants to be taken seriously as a major sport. It also wants to be insulated from the normal emotional weather of sport.
That contradiction became impossible to ignore at Shinnecock Hills. When Wyndham Clark endured a hostile gallery during the final round of the U.S. Open, parts of the golf establishment reacted as though civilization itself had briefly collapsed. Commentators lamented the behavior of Long Island fans. Some questioned whether the area should ever host another major championship. Others condemned spectators for cheering Clark’s mistakes, rooting openly for other players, or shouting the sort of remarks one routinely hears in stadiums from Boston to Buenos Aires.
Let us begin with the obvious concession. There is a line. Screaming during a player’s swing is unacceptable. Harassing families is unacceptable. Personal abuse, threats, drunken intimidation, or treating competitors as targets rather than people has no place in golf or in any other sport. But once that boundary has been established, golf still confronts an awkward question.
What, precisely, did it expect? For years the sport has insisted it wants younger audiences. It wants larger television ratings. It wants major championships in great metropolitan markets. It wants relevance beyond country clubs. It wants the cultural energy enjoyed by the NFL, the NBA, college football, and the World Cup.
Then some of those people arrive. And golf seems positively horrified that they behave like sports fans. One is reminded, inevitably, of Happy Gilmore, where Shooter McGavin dismisses Happy’s followers as “animals” who are destroying the traditions of the game. The joke endured because it recognized something true.
Golf has always feared ordinary spectators. Not abusive spectators. Ordinary ones. The sport wants New York. It simply does not want New Yorkers. It wants Philadelphia’s attention without Philadelphia’s temperament. It wants Chicago’s enthusiasm without Chicago’s tribalism. It wants Los Angeles’ audience without Los Angeles’ celebrity culture.
It wants expansion without disruption. That is not a strategy. It is wishful thinking.
Did golf genuinely imagine that the same public that boos quarterbacks, heckles relief pitchers, taunts opposing forwards, chants throughout ninety minutes of football, and treats every great rivalry as a morality play would suddenly arrive at Shinnecock dressed in linen, speaking in whispers, and applauding every player with equal warmth?
Why should they? Sport has never worked that way.
Tom Brady was not serenaded by Jets fans for completing another pass. The spectators at Anfield do not politely applaud Manchester United’s attacking movements. Philadelphia did not become famous for sporting restraint. This is, after all, the city whose mythology includes booing Santa Claus, and whose skyline contains not one, but two, statues of a fictional boxer.
Partisanship is not an unfortunate side effect of sport. It is one of its defining characteristics. People do not merely watch competitions. They choose sides. They invest emotionally. They hope one story succeeds and another fails. Provided that passion remains inside the boundaries of decency, this is not a corruption of sport.
It is sport.
Golf, however, has spent decades pretending otherwise. It speaks endlessly about rivalries. It romanticizes Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. It celebrates Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus. It remembers Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson. It tells nostalgic stories about divided galleries and unforgettable Sundays. Yet when a modern crowd develops a preference of its own, the sport suddenly discovers Victorian manners. Apparently, golf approves of rivalry only after history has safely converted it into a documentary.
This is not merely inconsistent. It is intellectually dishonest.
For years, golf has lamented the disappearance of personality. It has searched desperately for stars capable of attracting casual viewers. It has experimented with team competitions, elevated tournaments, new formats, and ever-larger prize purses and a soon to be rolled out competitive tier system similar to the Premier League. Every discussion eventually arrives at the same complaint.
The public, however, does not care; then the public demonstrates that it does care. It cheers. It groans. It chooses. It prefers one outcome over another. And golf responds by asking everyone to lower their voices.
The Wyndham Clark episode was unsettling not because it revealed something ugly about spectators. It revealed something uncomfortable about golf. The crowd did not hate Wyndham Clark. It simply wanted someone else. Perhaps it wanted Scottie Scheffler pursuing history. Perhaps it preferred another storyline. Perhaps it merely found itself emotionally invested elsewhere. Whatever the reason, the gallery behaved exactly as galleries behave across the sporting world. They picked a side. Golf treated this as an ethical crisis. But rooting against a competitor is not remotely the same thing as abusing one.
Conflating the two allows golf to preserve a comforting illusion that its spectators occupy a higher moral plane than everyone else’s. They do not. They have simply been selected differently. For generations, golf crowds were filtered by geography, cost, etiquette, and access.
The sport mistook those barriers for virtue. Now it seeks a broader public while expecting the atmosphere to remain unchanged. That is rather like opening the gates of a private club and then expressing disappointment that the public behaves… publicly. One is reminded by the pool scene at the fictious Bushwood Country Club from the cult classic Caddyshack.
There is a deeper irony still. Golf wants the World Cup’s audience. It admires the Ryder Cup’s atmosphere. It envies the NFL’s relevance. It covets the NBA’s cultural presence. But all of those spectacles emerge from precisely the emotional volatility golf spends so much energy trying to suppress.
You cannot manufacture passion while regulating every expression of it. You cannot invite the public into the room and then object when the room begins to sound public. Every successful spectator sport eventually accepts a simple truth. The crowd is not merely observing the event. The crowd becomes part of the event.
Golf still struggles to accept that reality. And perhaps that is because, despite all its talk of growth, it has never quite decided whether it wants to become a public sport or remain a private ceremony.
Feature Photo Credit: The Guardian
Coming June 29: The Difference Between Playing Golf and Watching Golf