You don’t need to be a season ticket-holder at MetLife Stadium or Madison Square Garden to know that New York fans are a special breed. Loud. Passionate. Demanding. Endlessly loyal … until they’re not. Win them a championship and you’ll win them for life; blow the big game and they’ll run you out of town. We’re largely talking about supporters of New York’s sundry sports teams but much of these same principles apply to the New Yorkers who pack the rope lines at the Greater Big Apple’s biggest golf tournaments. They, too, express their emotions in no uncertain terms.
New Yawkers will come into sharp focus when the Ryder Cup visits the Black Course at Bethpage State Park next week. (Bethpage is in Farmingdale, a Long Island town of 8,500 residents about 40 miles east of New York City.) We know the atmosphere will be loud and charged and boisterous because Ryder Cups always are. We know some fans will be especially chirpy by golf-fan standards, because, well … see: Ryder Cup. We also know all of this rowdiness and razzing and maybe even some rage has the potential to reach a new level of rowdiness and razzing and maybe even some rage because New York golf fans have some history.
Where to start? With the practice round at the 1974 U.S. Open at Winged Foot, where Jerry McGee got an earful from fans for struggling to advance a ball from a rough-choked lie? (“These are supposed to be professional golfers?” a spectator quipped.) Or with the 1986 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills, where Greg Norman barreled his way into the gallery to confront two foul-mouthed hecklers? (“I haven’t experienced this kind of stuff anywhere else,” Norman said. “Here they are opening their mouths too much.”)
Or with, well, pick your Bethpage Black major: the 2002 U.S. Open, where Sergio Garcia was so rattled by the smack-talking masses that he responded with a middle-fingered salute; the 2009 U.S. Open, where on Saturday Tiger Woods shushed the fans, and the USGA, in an effort to curb revelers, shut down beer sales early; or the 2019 PGA Championship, where eventual champion Brooks Koepka heard it from the galleries on Sunday when he carded four consecutive back-nine bogeys. “It’s New York,” Koepka later said of the boo birds. “What do you expect when you’re half-choking it away?”
And next week, when the Europeans come to town, looking to become the first road team to win a Ryder Cup in 13 years, in the wake of the contentious 2023 edition in Italy that saw tensions among players and caddies (namely, Patrick Cantlay’s looper, Joe LaCava) spill from the golf course into the parking lot? Ooh, boy, hold on to your periscopes and Mich Ultras, folks, because this Bethpage Ryder Cup could devolve into flat-out anarchy!
“I think it has the potential to be the most disrespectful fanbase of all time in golf,” Gregg Giannotti told me in a phone interview earlier this week. “I really believe this. I don’t want to sound dramatic, but there’s a couple of reasons why.”
Giannotti, better known to New York sports fans as “Gio,” is the co-host, along with NFL great Boomer Esiason, of the popular WFAN sports-talk show, “Gio and Boomer.” Gio spends his days chopping it up with New York sports fans, he’s obsessed with golf and he lives on Long Island. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone better suited to speculate on what nuttiness might unfold next week.
For one, Giannotti said, golf has never been more popular, and with heightened interest in the game could come an unprecedented surge of electricity across New York’s fabled “People’s Course.” “Then you put in the whole USA patriotism thing and New York and just the type of person that’s going to attend and want to get in the face and yell at Rory and others — it’s going to be insane,” Giannotti said. “On top of it everybody wants to be a superstar these days and they want to film something and then they want be the guy who [a player] flips the bird to or has [a player] turn around and scowl and yell at you. They want to antagonize these guys and get in their face and get that reaction.”
That would be Rory as in Rory McIlroy, who on the back of a dream season in which he won the Masters, played an Open Championship in his homeland and won the Irish Open outside Dublin, will not, needless to say, enjoy the same warm reception at Bethpage that he did at those other venues. Of all the Europeans, McIlroy, in fact, is likely to weather the brunt of the American crowd’s might.
Uber-prepared European captain Luke Donald knows what’s coming. To ready the Euros for the chaos, Donald supplied his team with VR headsets that simulate the experience of playing in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans. “It’s better to try to desensitize yourself as much as possible before you get in there,” McIlroy said Sunday, sounding like he was preparing not for a golf tournament but a steel-cage match.
New Yorkers’ intensity comes from the heart-thumping energy of the city in which they live in and around. There’s an inherent toughness, an edge, in New Yorkers, but also a deep-seeded sense of we need to take of another, and root for one another — on an individual level but also on the team level. Perhaps especially on the team level.
Bethpage Black’s next major? It’s coming sooner than expected
By:
James Colgan
“The New York fan has such a passion,” Ed Anazlone told me the other day. Anazlone — more commonly known as “Fireman Ed” — himself is a New York super-fan. A retired Harlem-based firefighter, Anazlone is renowned in New York sports circles for wearing his signature green-and-white rescue helmet to Jets game and riling up the faithful with chants of J-E-T-S! JETS! JETS! JETS! “You got people that come from the streets, they are tough, and so when they love something, they’re loyal,” Anazlone continued on the DNA of New York fans. “That’s just what we were taught from the start. When you hung out in the schoolyard, you were taught loyalty and to stick with your guys no matter what, and I just think New York is like that.”
Not all of the fans at Bethpage will be NYC-area locals, of course, but many will. Somewhere in the vicinity of 50,000 ticket-holders will roam the grounds on each match day, including one particularly notable ex-New Yorker who knows a little something about activating bases. On Friday, President Donald Trump is expected to make an appearance. Randy Simons, the New York State parks commissioner, said in press conference Wednesday that security is a top priority for the event. Five-hundred state troopers will be onsite along with another 100 park police officers, plus representation from the local and county municipalities’ law enforcement squads. Surveillance drones also will be on patrol.
Still, it’s hard to police heckling, which, in theory, Giannotti said, the U.S. team could hear from their own fans if things start going sideways. “The crowd could turn on the Americans,” he said. “We don’t like losing. How many times has everybody watched Jets fans boo their own team off the field at halftime? For God’s sake, they booed Aaron Judge at Yankee Stadium last year. We turn on our teams and we scream at them, and we expect more. That could end up working in the favor of the Europeans if they end up playing well.”
It’s hard to fully capture the excitement and anticipation around this event. Since the PGA of America announced the Bethpage Ryder Cup in 2013, the hype seemingly has grown by the year — and, now, by the day. For a long time, Phil Mickelson and Sergio Garcia — both of whom played starring roles in the 2002 U.S. Open on the Black Course — seemed destined to be their teams’ respective captains. Instead, Donald is back to defend the title he helped win for Europe in 2023, and a guy no one saw coming — 39-year-old Keegan Bradley — is helming the U.S. side. Bradley’s not a born-and-bred New Yorker, but he did spend his college years in Queens, at St. John’s University. He understands the ethos of New York fans.
“Nobody on either team wants this to get uncomfortable or weird out there,” Bradley said last year. “But, listen, you come into Yankee Stadium, you come into Madison Square Garden, you come into these places, it’s a tough place to play, and Luke and the boys know that.”
And now the week — finally — is just about upon us.
“We’ve been talking about it forever,” Giannotti said of himself and his golf pals. “The anticipation for this golf event is like nothing I’ve ever experienced.” Giannotti acknowledges some of that build-up can be attributed to him being a Long Islander and a golf nut. But there’s something bigger at work, too, he said.
“I’m trying not to have recency bias,” he said. “But this could be, with everything considered — where it is, the tensions from the last Ryder Cup, the fanbase, golf’s popularity — this could be the biggest golf event of my lifetime. It really could be. Like I said, I’m biased, but I’m going to be as into this as anything I’ve been into in a very, very long time because there’s a personal aspect to it, too. The Ryder Cup is personal in a sense of your country’s pride, but then you add the fact that it’s here in your backyard at a public course — I mean, for God’s sake, if we lose this thing, you won’t be able to talk to me for two weeks.”
Him and a few million other American golf fans.
