George Ferguson Column: No way I could stay mad at Rory

I think it’s safe to say, I’m a fan of golf. I’m pretty sure everyone knows that. And, I’m a big fan of the Ryder Cup, and I, as much as anybody, desperately wanted the Americans to win back the Ryder Cup two weeks ago in Minnesota.

So I was elated when Team USA did just that.

And, as we all saw on television, the atmosphere at Hazeltine National in Minnesota was unlike anything anybody has seen in golf. It was loud, raucous, and at times, bordered on anarchy. From a gallery standpoint, it rivaled a Team USA game in World Cup soccer.

Yes, the fans at the Ryder Cup were that crazy.

Watching it made me want to be there so badly, especially considering I passed through Minneapolis not long ago, and seeing all of the Ryder Cup hype made me wish I was there even more. Who knows, had it not been for a trip to the U.S. Open tennis tournament, maybe I would have.

But I will say this about the Ryder Cup, no matter how bad I wanted the U.S. to get that damn little trophy back, no matter how much pride I felt sitting in front of the TV screaming, just like the fans in Minnesota were doing, the game of golf is global and because of that, often times, some of your favorite players aren’t even Americans. And because it’s such a global game, even during the Ryder Cup, I couldn’t help but still be a fan of guys like Justin Rose and especially Rory McIlroy.

I’m a fan of golf in general, even during that one week every two years when I become ravaged by USA golf pride, the Ryder Cup and all it stands for makes it hard to root against the opposition.

Having said that for part of the week I sure found myself rooting against McIlroy, which was weird for me because he’s absolutely one of my favorite players to watch, and he’s one of the best young ambassadors for the game in the world.

Still, Rory’s mouth was really aggravating me, in his press conferences leading up to Friday’s first round, on the course over the first two days of the competition, and in his post-match press conferences both of those first two nights.

Simply put, Rory was whining as much as he was roaring, which I found a wee bit hypocritical, considering Rory is one of the biggest trash talkers in the game, and he brought his A-game to Minnesota in that regard.

Now don’t misunderstand me. The American fans were dishing it out to Rory and the Euros. And there’s no doubt in my mind that fans certainly crossed lines that shouldn’t have been crossed during the 2016 Ryder Cup.

To me however, maybe Rory should have let someone else on his team do the whining about it, because, every other week on the PGA Tour, American fans adore Rory. They pay a lot of money to watch him play in events like the Tour Championship just one week earlier, they buy and wear his extremely overpriced Nike apparel and they roar for him on tour as loud as they do for any American-born player playing right now.

So, for Rory to call out American fans, which he did numerous times on and off the course that week, it seemed like he was, in essence, biting the hand that feeds him. And if somebody needed to whine about the behavior coming from the galleries at the Ryder Cup, Rory had Sergio Garcia to do that. After all, nobody whines quite like Sergio does.

Yes, by Saturday night at the Ryder Cup, I had honestly about had it with Rory McIlroy, and that’s a shame because, again, he’s one of my all-time favorites.

But when I was just about to give up on Rory for good, he turned it all around.

On Sunday, in what was one of the greatest Ryder Cup matches I’ve ever seen, Rory was anything but a whiner. He and Patrick Reed put on an epic show, with their golf games, and their back-and-forth trash talk and their showmanship to the huge galleries following them.

In what was one of the most intense golf matches in the history of the Ryder Cup, and with 45,000 screaming fans rooting against him, Rory came through, showing what a class act he really is. He engaged Reed multiple times, applauding him for his own brand of trash talk, and, by the end of the match, a match Reed won, not only had Rory won me back, I’m pretty sure he’d won over the entire American gallery, too.

And it didn’t stop there. The Americans reveled in their win, while no Euro was more gracious in defeat than McIlroy. In a post-match interview, he smiled, complimented Reed and the Americans and admitted to how much fun he had during the match.

In the European team press conference, McIlroy was asked multiple teams about the behavior of American fans, almost as if the press was trying to goat him into trashing on the Red, White and Blue. Instead, McIlroy stood up for the fans, saying if he had that many beers in him, starting at 7:30 a.m., he’d be acting the same way. Instead of whining he was laughing, and over and over, he reiterated that the atmosphere was exactly how it should be, and that people come to the Ryder Cup to have a good time, so let them have a good time.

Even late into the night when the golf was all done, I saw social media pictures of McIlroy at post-Ryder Cup events, hanging with the American players, many of whom, including Tiger Woods, are his very close friends.

No, in the end McIlroy, even in defeat, managed to do it all right. He stole the show on the golf course, and he said and did all the right things off it. In other words, Rory was a huge reason why this Ryder Cup was what it was.

So there’s a lesson in all of this, and it’s an old one. Never judge a book by its cover. Because just when I was about to turn Rory into a villain in my eyes, he reminded why there’s no way he could ever play that role with me.

Put another way, and to steal a line from the great movie Dumb and Dumber, just when I thought Rory couldn’t possibly have me hating him more, he goes out and does what he did on Sunday, and totally redeemed himself!