This article is taken from the April 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Did Arnold Palmer’s penis swing the US election? Two weeks out from polling day last year, Donald Trump visited the great golfer’s hometown in Pennsylvania and spoke not about his seven majors but one of Palmer’s other attributes. “This is a guy that was all man,” he said with a wink and a leer. “When he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said ‘Oh my God, that’s unbelievable’.” It was brash; it was crass; it was weird. It worked. Trump’s locker-room gags, especially compared with the joyless Kamala Harris, turned it round. America wanted a president who made cock jokes.
Palmer died in 2016, five days before the Ryder Cup in Hazeltine, Minnesota. “Arnie is smiling down,” Barack Obama tweeted after that US win, a president of a more poetic instinct. On his death, Obama had said: “With his homemade swing and homespun charm, Arnold Palmer was the American Dream come to life.” He didn’t add: “Hung like a donkey, he was.”
Trump is, of course, the best golfer since Kim Jong Il
I raise this because the Hazeltine Ryder Cup was noted for the yobbish behaviour of the fans, who cheered every European error and shouted abuse at them and their families, so at least their president acted with dignity. Some of these beered-up geddinahollerers had, to be fair, been wound up by an article by the brother of Danny Willett, the English winner of that year’s Masters, who called American Ryder Cup fans “a baying mob of imbeciles”. They didn’t have to prove him right.
In September, America hosts the Ryder Cup again, and some fear this one will be Hazeltine on ketamine. Maybe that would calm some of them down. Bethpage Black in Long Island already has a reputation as a bearpit. A sign by the first tee warns that it is an “extremely difficult course” only to be tackled by the most skilled golfers. It doesn’t mention that the fans down from New York are among its toughest hazards. Even on practice days.
Colin Montgomerie, the Scottish golfer, was showered with abuse during the 2002 US Open there, while the atmosphere at the 2019 US PGA was so vile, even to unfavoured Americans, that Shane Lowry, the Irish golfer, said Europe should select the “12 most thick-skinned players” for the Ryder Cup and perhaps not bring their wives. “It will be brutal,” he said. Exuberance is good — the Ryder Cup thrives on noise and atmosphere — but loutishness isn’t. It is so dull for a start.
Throw in the international politics of 2025 and that Trump will almost certainly be there — this year he was the first sitting president to attend the Super Bowl — and the geed-up patriotism will make American golf fans grate again. Trump missed the chance to host a Ryder Cup in his first term. It should have been at Whistling Straits, Wisconsin, in September 2020, a few weeks before he fought re-election, but was postponed by the pandemic. An American win might have swayed some votes his way. He will not want to miss this one.
At Trump’s victory rally last November, he was joined by Bryson DeChambeau, the US Open champion and a certainty for their Ryder team. “He’s a fantastic golfer,” Trump said. “Hits the ball slightly longer than me — just a little bit.” He was being characteristically modest. Trump is, of course, the best golfer since Kim Jong Il had 11 holes-in-one in his very first round.
Keegan Bradley, this year’s US captain, had to apologise recently after a documentary included a clip of him telling his team at the Presidents Cup last year that “We’re gonna go to Bethpage to kick their fucking ass”. He should be cut some slack, as they say, for high emotions in the locker room, even if there was a Netflix camera crew there, but it will only add to the febrile atmosphere.
And they badly need this win. Europe are the defending champions, so sharing the spoils will retain the Cup, after an unexpected victory in Rome two years ago. The Americans had six players in the world’s top ten and all of their 12 were in the top 25 but they didn’t win a match on the first day. They lost 16.5-11.5 with European rookies like Bob Macintyre, the world No 55, or Ludvig Aberg, a Swede who had turned professional three months earlier, standing out.
This time, the Europeans have started a Ryder Cup year in very good form. Four of the first six events on the PGA Tour in the US were won by players from this side of the Atlantic — Rory McIlroy, Aberg, Sepp Straka and Thomas Detry — and Europeans won two of the first three tournaments on the breakaway Saudi-backed LIV Tour, one of them the veteran Spaniard Sergio Garcia, who has so often been the heartbeat of the Europe team room.
America still have three of the world’s top four and 12 of the top 21. Bradley’s dilemma is what to do about himself. After winning the 2011 US PGA on his debut in a major, his career stagnated but the 38-year-old is in fine form and up to number 11 in the world. Some suggest he should pick himself in the team and stand down as captain. Maybe the commander-in-chief and keenest golfer in the Oval Office since Eisenhower might fancy leading the side? If so, Team Europe had better pack earplugs.
