Policing the Ryder Cup by bike sounds fun. But it’s serious business

FARMINGDALE, N.Y. — This 45th Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black, deep in a 1,400-acre state park, was always going to be a spectacle. And then the President of the United States showed up, to check out the first-day action. For the hundreds of police officers working the event — on foot, in golf carts, on bikes — it was like a changing of the guard. Their bosses were still their bosses, but now the Secret Service was running the show.

Around 11 a.m., Kory Barney, one of a dozen officers covering the event by bike, looked up from the saddle of his trusty 21-speed black Trek mountain bike and saw Air Force One flying over the course. Over a 20-year career as a New York State Park officer, he thought he had seen it all. On Friday, he discovered he hadn’t.

“In this job, your adrenaline is always pumping,” Lt. Barney was saying Friday afternoon, shortly after Donald Trump had left the building. “But with POTUS here, it was even more.”

It was 3 p.m. Barney’s day had begun 12 hours earlier, in a hotel room, dressing for work in the middle of the night. He put on his black bike shorts with their cargo pockets, his steel-gray five-pound Kevlar vest, his black Park Police/Bethpage Black golf shirt. Then, finally, his black tool belt (in a manner of speaking), a Glock dangling from it, above his right pocket. Long before sunrise, he was in the tournament’s police command center, getting a pep talk from his captain with stakes far higher than anything the 24 Ryder Cup players will hear from theirs: “Take care of yourself, take care of each other, take care of the people out there.”

Out on the course, the tone was lighter.

Can I buy your shirt?

Can I get a ride?

You wanna beer?

New York.

Barney is from way Upstate New York and as kid who took some golf lessons from the local pro, Derek Sprague, who today is CEO of the PGA of America. Barney, a father and a husband, is a 200-pound man who can run a mile in 6 minutes, ski any double black diamond trail, bike rocky mountain trails all day long and break 90 on any given Sunday, but not this Sunday. He’ll be working.

Barney will tell you that a bicycle is an unlikely but spectacular way to traverse a golf course and tour its perimeter. He’s there not to watch the golf but to watch the people watching the golf. He wears impenetrable sunglasses. You can’t know what he’s looking at.

“You’re constantly scanning the crowd,” Barney was saying Friday afternoon. “You’re looking for something that’s out of the ordinary, looking for a person who is acting in an odd way, or being someplace they are not supposed to be.”

He observed a man kneeling on a macadam path and pretending, oddly, that the long prongs of plant were a kind of wig.

“Does this guy give you anything to worry about?” Barney was asked.

“Nah,” Barney said. “He’s just having some fun.”

An unattended knapsack, that can be troubling. Three extra-large frat boys, hatless and sunburned and stumbling, that can be troubling. A guy turning a plant into a wig, that’s nothing.

Five days into this long seven-day work week, the biggest issue Barney had seen was overserved patrons, and there hasn’t been much of that. It’s expensive, getting bombed on $18 beers. Nobody wants to get thrown out after paying $750 (minimum) for a one-day ticket, for the first-ever Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black.

Barney and the 11 other bike officers ride in the rough, among the fans, and never in the fairways, among the players. The wheels of Barney’s Trek were sometimes rolling through slop on Friday, kicking up mud on his calves, which years of skiing, running and biking have turned into tree limbs. Over the course of the week, he’ll put hundreds of miles on his bike. He often, by choice, goes 16 hours without eating. He’ll sleep and eat and catch up on his life as Sunday turns into Monday and this Ryder Cup finds its place in the books. Until then, he has two priorities, the second more important than the first:

*Put some good mojo on the home team;

*Serve and protect; serve and protect; serve and protect.

Stopping is an occupational hazard. When he stops, he becomes a human information booth. People want to know where they can by merch, how to get to the spectator shuttles, what hole Bryson DeChambeau is on and the like. Kory Barney answers every question he can, as patiently as he can, looking all the while out into the middle distance, scanning to his left and to his right, like a tennis fan watching a rally. He says, “Let’s keep moving here.”

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com.