Captain America fled the scene of the crime on a golf buggy that chugged up the steep slope from the 15th green. All Bryson DeChambeau’s rabble-rousing bravado had left him by then and he did not look back to survey the ruins of the USA team that lay scattered beneath him all around Bethpage Black.
DeChambeau and his partner, Justin Thomas, were supposed to have been the ones who set the tone at the start of this 45th Ryder Cup, the brave Americans who stuck it to Tyrrell Hatton and Jon Rahm, whipped the crowd into a frenzy and established the kind of momentum that would make Luke Donald’s Europe team cower.
Instead, DeChambeau and Thomas set a different sort of tone. They may have come out to the first tee just after dawn, wrapped together in the American flag like superheroes in a cloak but they lost the first match of the day and they surrendered the first point of the day.
Hatton and Rahm were not impressed by them and they were not intimated by them and they were certainly not outplayed by them. The Europeans trounced DeChambeau and Thomas 4&3 in the morning foursomes and, behind them, the other dominoes fell. So much for Captain America’s rebel yell. It fell silent.
The noise? The din? The abuse? The hostility? The truth is, it was barely there. The fans were so subdued it was tempting to think of them as the dissolute overspill from one of the louche parties imagined by F Scott Fitzgerald and thrown by the Great Gatsby here on Long Island in the 1920s.
Sure there was a military fly-past involving some F15 fighters and a KC-135 Stratotanker as the players stood on the first tee. That generated some decibels. And after DeChambeau crashed a drive over the trees towards the apron of the green, he turned and shook his fist towards the grandstand, which got a reaction.
After the early bravado, things quickly went wrong for Bryson DeChambeau on Friday morning
DeChambeau and Justin Thomas were outplayed, losing 4&3 to Tyrrell Hatton and Jon Rahm
There were isolated flashpoints throughout the day. A US fan yelled ‘Get some cardio,’ at Bob MacIntyre late in his foursomes defeat, with Viktor Hovland against Xander Schauffele and Patrick Cantlay. ‘You look like you’re still breastfeeding,’ someone shouted at Matt Fitzpatrick.
There was a roar, too, when DeChambeau and Thomas went 1up on the first and the crowd tried to jump on the Europeans when they made their way to the second tee. ‘Unnh-oh,’ an American voice shouted out theatrically when Rahm hit an errant shot. ‘Mediocre,’ someone else yelled. It was all relatively tame.
It got tamer still when Hatton and Rahm turned the match round by going from one down on the 6th to 1up on the eighth. DeChambeau and Thomas never looked like getting back on level terms.
Fanaticism needs fuel and after the first few holes, DeChambeau and Thomas could not provide any. It was so quiet by the third tee as the players approached that the song of a blue jay was the only sound that interrupted the beautiful early autumn day. Bethpage Black was supposed to be a bear-pit but it was more like a nature trail.
Sure, there were pockets of life. There were islands of abuse. When Hatton hooked his tee shot into a kind of scrubland near the Pouring Bar at the side of the fifth fairway, it came to rest near an outhouse. The US fans loved that. ‘It’s next to the s***ter,’ one yelled out helpfully to Rahm, to much hilarity.
And when DeChambeau birdied the 14th, he pumped his fist in the air and exhorted the crowd to get loud. But then Rahm sank a 10ft putt to tie the hole and keep Europe 3Up and the atmosphere fell flat again.
By then, the board was showing Europe so far ahead in two of the other morning matches that the USA tried to throw all their resources into cheering on DeChambeau and Thomas in one last desperate effort to claw back their three-hole deficit.
There is a vertiginous hill that plunges from the 14th green to the 15th tee and as Hatton and Rahm marched down it, it felt as if they were at last feeling the full force of American fervour that they had been promised would rain down on them.
Bethpage was supposed to be a bear-pit but as USA struggled, it resembled a nature trail
DeChambeau struggled to give the American fans much to cheer about on Friday morning
Basketball legend Michael Jordan had appeared by then and rode a golf buggy down the hill, the McLaren chief executive Zak Brown was there and the USA captain Keegan Bradley had joined the support party.
By then, Bradley had a haunted look in his eyes. Bradley is not an inscrutable man. He is not good at hiding his emotions and he looked close to panic as he surveyed the digital scoreboards that were liberally splashed with blue. I walked down the slope next to him and a solitary bead of sweat was rolling down his cheek.
It all made Bradley’s Dances with Wolves homage the evening before, running down the 18th, holding the flag aloft, trying to inflame the crowd, look even more absurd than it had at the time.
At the bottom of the slope there was a narrow human corridor of fans and, at last, a wall of noise. A giant Stars and Stripes flag was strung between two oak trees so that formed a kind of canopy that the players walked beneath.
The crowd booed Hatton and Rahm lustily. They jeered and yelled and mocked. But Hatton and Rahm strode on through them, side by side, unruffled, united, determined and confident in their lead.
And just to emphasise that the Europeans were not unsettled, it was DeChambeau who sliced his drive wildly off the 15th tee so that it came to rest at the foot of a giant hospitality marquee. Hatton smoked his drive down the centre of the fairway.
Michael Jordan was among the high-profile early observes on a difficult day
DeChambeau shakes hands with Europe’s Tyrell Hatton, who kept him quiet Friday morning
When Thomas missed yet another short putt on the 15th, Europe was 4up with three to play. It was over. Thomas turned to DeChambeau and apologised.
The Europeans celebrated. Hatton mentioned to a television interviewer that the crowd conditions had been ‘tough’ and I asked him how tough. He smiled. ‘Until you are there and actually living it, you never really know,’ he said. ‘It was pretty cool, though.’
Behind him, DeChambeau was making his escape. Captain America climbed on to that buggy and drove away to search for his superpowers and for redemption.
