Charming Europe seal sensational Ryder Cup over products-of-populism Team USA

Bethpage Black smelled like revolution. A look at the scoreboard showed red, red everywhere, and no time left to think.

There were moments on Sunday in which Europe winning the two points necessary to retain the trophy became utterly unimaginable. Had anyone ever actually won two points before? Winning three in a session, as they had done twice the day prior, seemed gluttonous, frivolous, the real miracle here.

A significant contributing factor was sheer exhaustion – of the six players from both sides to play all five sessions, only one won their singles match. Europe had to give more to get more from the first two days. Rory McIlroy looked punchdrunk, Tommy Fleetwood – now statistically the best European player ever having won his first four matches – fresh out of magic.

“That was probably the most stressful 12 hours of my life”, said Luke Donald, even though it had only been six since Justin Rose stepped up to the first tee. It was that sort of day, sport at its exhausting human best, vulnerable and erratic and beautiful.

Enter Shane Lowry, McIlroy’s enforcer and saviour the afternoon prior, one down to Russell Henley coming up the last. Henley chips out of the bunker to ten feet, then inexplicably leaves his putt short. Europe have won 1 ½ of the first seven points. Lowry knows how desperately this needs to go. And so it goes.

Social media has changed how athletes celebrate, painfully aware of cameras, conscious to produce something that looks as good as it feels. Yet Lowry was unencumbered by such concerns, spasming as though electrocuted, sprinting in no particular direction, joy so overwhelming neither body nor brain could process it. Having bearhugged his caddy and his wife and emitted a primal, guttural roar, he then patrolled the 18th as celebrant-in-chief, a father welcoming his surviving sons home from war with embraces tender as they were euphoric.

“That was the hardest couple of hours of my whole life,” he would later say. “But the Ryder Cup means everything to me”. He is the epitome of everything a Ryder Cup golfer should be.

Tickets were reselling for less than half their initial price before play began on Sunday, such was the confidence that Europe’s 11.5-4.5 lead was impenetrable, rising to 12-5 after Viktor Hovland’s withdrawal with a neck injury, a half-point which almost proved decisive. But even fate decided it really didn’t fancy enduring years of whingeing American discourse, and let Tyrrell Hatton and Bob MacIntyre ensure it finished beyond doubt or reproach.

While the American renaissance changed the texture of this match, it should not temper the significance of victory, only the fifth European away win ever. Sunday reinforced how impressive the previous two days’ performance had been – the highest score accumulated by any Ryder Cup team by Saturday evening – not simply better players playing better but a triumph of unity and perseverance against genuine adversity.

Perhaps the greatest relief and reward of Lowry’s putt was witnessing the winding rivers of home fans returning to lives in which you assume they don’t scream unprovoked obscenities at passersby. After a slow start, the fairytale of New York got its boors in Maga hats shouting homophobic slurs at McIlroy, a grim reminder of the ever-shifting Overton window of Trump’s America.

The confidence to personal abuse at athletes and their families, and believe you won’t be arrested or punched, isn’t created in a vacuum.

This is the product of a populism that emboldens the nastiest recesses of humanity, rewards anything that demands attention, strains limits of common decency ever further. The number of volunteer stewards joining in with the abuse was heinous, but the vast majority were hordes of Wall Street bros compromised by the heady rush of two light beers cosplaying what they believe sports fandom to be, a charming reminder that money and privilege can’t buy you a personality, or a sense of humour.

As McIlroy pointed out, there was far more negativity towards the European players than there was support for the Americans, a reminder that he, Fleetwood, Jon Rahm and co are largely more popular in the US than an American team largely comprising uber-talented misfits and relative unknowns. That DeChambeau, a caricature of the worst tenets of masculine insecurity and all-round Odd Bloke, received the most vociferous support because he has a YouTube channel and bootlicks Trump is a neat summation of the entire snafu.

And the past three days did little to disprove the traditional stereotypes that the American individualism makes their squad a collection of individuals forced together by the format, while Europe are able to unify into something bigger than themselves. Through the first two days, seven of the nine best putters were European. Fleetwood and Rose’s Saturday fourballs session against Scottie Scheffler and DeChambeau was transcendent, birdieing 12 of 15 holes, golf at the edge of the world.

This is not entirely attributable to Luke Donald’s captaincy, and yet it would likely not have happened without him. Donald has now won six Ryder Cups, only the second European to oversee an away victory and the first to win two as captain since Tony Jacklin. By modernising the European approach to this tournament, this victory is his as much as any player’s, trusting Edoardo Molinari’s analytics and bothering to make minor improvements.

Donald’s post-victory press conference made grim listening for the Garden City Hotel, where Team Europe were based, saying he requested they change the shampoo and bedding, and blocked out light coming from under the doors. Did Europe win the Ryder Cup because their hair smelled 10% nicer? Almost certainly not, but it speaks to a depth of thought and preparation the US largely seem to consider unsporting, as though only vibes-based preparation is in the spirit of this thing. Keegan Bradley’s selection criteria for the captaincy largely appeared to be that he’s “like, really obsessed with the Ryder Cup”.

And so to Adare Manor in 2027. Donald will likely believe there are no worlds left to conquer, while the US captaincy is in such dire straits that Phil Mickelson – who this week tweeted that Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar should be “sent back to Somalia” – has ruled himself out of running.

McIlroy and Lowry will return to their home island as kings of the world. Asked if he was looking forward to it, Lowry said: “It’ll be a little bit nicer than playing here, I know that”. But the greater the pain, the greater the glory. And as Donald raised his prize to the Long Island sky, it was glorious.

Photograph by Michael Reaves/PGA of America via Getty Images