At Ryder Cup marred by ugliness, U.S. showed class in defeat

The thing that people don’t get — that is, people who are not golf people — is that golf is about losing. You lose all the time and now and again you win. The reason Jack Nicklaus is so widely considered to be one of the greatest sportsmen ever, across all sports, is because of the grace he showed in defeat.

The reason Tommy Fleetwood, the English Ryder Cup star, was holding the 2025 Ryder Cup Nicklaus-Jacklin Award Sunday night was because of the grace he has shown in his various and harrowing defeats. At the 2023 Ryder Cup, the English golfer Justin Rose was given the award. On Sunday night, as the Europeans were celebrating their victory in the Ryder Cup, Rose tried to spray Fleetwood with Champagne. Fleetwood used his Nicklaus-Jacklin Award plate as a shield.

The award gets its name from two historic Ryder Cup figures, Jack Nicklaus and one of his contemporaries, the English golfer Tony Jacklin, who won the U.S. Open in 1970. Later Jacklin was a four-time Ryder Cup captain. The two golfers will be linked forever for a putt Nicklaus gave Jacklin as the final moment of the 1969 Ryder Cup, an act of sporting grace that should mean more now than it did then, and it meant a great deal then. That Ryder Cup ended in a 16-16 tie, capped by what’s now known as The Concession.

On Sunday night, I asked Fleetwood if the 2025 American Ryder Cup team lost with grace.

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“Yes, they did,” Fleetwood said. This, one day after one of the most unattractive days, for golfing manners, the sport has ever witnessed. The issue on Saturday at Bethpage Black was fan behavior. But every American player, caddie, plus the captain and his five assistants and other team personnel could have done more to keep the peace.

“There are a lot of guys on the U.S. team that I would classify as close friends on Tour,” Fleetwood said. “It’s one thing when you’re competing against a person as an individual, and it’s another when you’re competing as part of a team.” The team mentality, Fleetwood seemed to suggest, breeds a heightened intensity, and that can come at the cost of manners and custom. He was saying it did not at Bethpage on Sunday. He said, “We all shook hands when it was over.”

And how about Saturday?

“It is what it is,” Fleetwood said. Or it was what it was. “Our guys did an amazing job playing under those circumstances.”

Rory McIlroy endured a torrent of verbal abuse on Saturday, and by extension so did his wife, Erica. Golf at its highest level woke up with a black eye on Sunday. For the sake of the game and its traditional standards of grace, the very thing that Jack Nicklaus especially stood for, golf needed a good Sunday at the Ryder Cup. Golf delivered.

At some distance in time and space, McIlroy grew up in a suburb of Belfast under the spell of Jack Nicklaus. McIlroy’s father, Gerry, was a huge Nicklaus fan. Over the last 15 or more years, Rory has been able to get to know Nicklaus well and lives near him at the Bear’s Club in South Florida.

Sunday night, on the practice putting green, his white team shirt soaked with Champagne, McIlroy talked briefly, in a manner of speaking, about Nicklaus’s legacy.

“The American players conducted themselves with class today, absolutely,” McIlroy said. “All week, really. Very classy. We put them in a hole early and they handled it well.

“With some of the stuff I had to deal with this week on the course, I really appreciated how [Justin Thomas and Cameron Young] tried to calm the crowd down,” McIlroy said, referring to his Saturday afternoon better-ball session with Shane Lowry. “With Scottie [Scheffler] today, it wasn’t much of a match in terms of the quality of the golf, but it was very civil. All the players were. They’ve all said, ‘We’re so sorry with what you had to go through.’ It’s tough to lose the Ryder Cup. I’ve been there. But they handled themselves with class.”

The scoreboard total showed the Europeans winning 15-13. As is often the case, the scoreboard total barely hinted at the bubbling stories underneath it. Two bad days of bad golf behavior could have really hurt golf. On Sunday, golf got a W.