Ryder Cup could be geopolitical tinderbox

Notorious Bethpage will be stage for most tense U.S.-European showdown in history

Could flag-waving reach an unhealthy fevered pitch at Bethpage? (Adam Davy/PA Images via Getty Images)

Until a few weeks ago, most people had likely never heard of something called the 4 Nations Face-Off — a brand-new mid-season hockey round-robin tournament pitting the best NHL players representing the countries of the Sweden, Finland, Canada and the United States. It was a format created to inject some life into the tired tradition of mid-season all-star games.

On Feb. 20, however, more than 21 million people in North America — 10.4 million at its peak (9.3 million average) in the U.S. according to Nielsen and 10.7 million across Canada according to SportsNet — watched Canada defeat the U.S. 3-2 in overtime in Boston. That smashes the highest hockey ratings in decades, and is roughly 4 million more than watched last year’s U.S./Canada Stanley Cup final Game 7 pitting the Florida Panthers against the Edmonton Oilers. It was the highest rated non-NFL event ever on ESPN’s cable platform. The last time a golf tournament enjoyed that kind of viewership was in 1997, when 20.3 million tuned in to see the final round of Tiger Woods winning the Masters.

The 4 Nations creators could not possibly have imagined how well it would be received. The event certainly had potential since hockey had a dearth of best-on-best opportunities since the 2014 Winter Olympics, with the NHL skipping the 2018 Games and pandemic travel complications scuttling hopes of returning in the 2022 Olympics. When the NHL came up with the idea a year ago, the host nations of Canada and the U.S. were long-standing cordial neighbors and allies.

All that changed over the last month as relations between Canada and the U.S. have grown frostier than the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and Alaska. Political tensions between countries with the longest shared border in the world have heightened to an unprecedented degree since President Trump first threatened to impose 25 percent tariffs on America’s largest trading partner and has repeatedly antagonized with the notion of annexing a sovereign nation that is 1.6 percent larger than the U.S.

Canada “will someday, maybe soon, become our cherished, and very important, Fifty First State,” Trump wrote on social media regarding his message in a phone call to the U.S. team before the 4 Nations final. After Canada’s greatest current star Connor McDavid delivered the game-winner in overtime, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted: “You can’t take our country — and you can’t take our game.”

Things got heated between the Canadians and Americans in 4 Nations Face-off (Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images)

“A lot of stuff going on with Canada and the USA right now, and us playing against each other was kind of a perfect storm for our sport,” said Nathan MacKinnon, tournament MVP for Canada. “It was much more popular than even we would have imagined. It was getting so much attention from our whole continent.”

What does all this have to do with golf? Well, if month-long simmering hostilities between the U.S. and its notoriously polite neighbors can spark boos of national anthems and generate such taut emotions over a tournament that had never existed before February, can you imagine the powder keg that is smoldering with a nearly century-old and already super-charged event like the Ryder Cup on tap in seven months at Bethpage Black on Long Island in New York?

The Ryder Cup has been a spirited affair ever since continental Europe was invited to the biennial party in 1979. Decorum has often crossed the line of proper golf etiquette, particularly at U.S. venues, even when the only real hostility between the U.S. and Europe was the color of the laundry each side wore.

Concerns about the potential for unseemly behavior outside the ropes have been bandied about ever since Bethpage Black was first announced as the Ryder Cup venue back in 2013. New York area fans have a long reputation for being boisterous, and Bethpage was the site back in 2002 where Sergio Garcia was mercilessly heckled at the U.S. Open as he worked through some re-gripping issues.

“The 2025 edition promises to be a seminal moment that could either make or break the matches,” wrote GolfChannel.com’s Rex Hoggard when the Ryder Cup was still a year away.

“It’s not going to be a question of if fans step over the line next year at Bethpage. Fans, these fans, have been stepping over the line since the Brooklyn Dodgers played at the Polo Grounds and no amount of wishful thinking or proactive policing is going to change that.”

U.S. captain Keegan Bradley says the PGA of America has a plan in place for policing bad behavior, but as Hoggard wrote, that “sounds like a fun game of picking the loud New Yorker out of crowd of thousands of loud New Yorkers.”

If people were worried about overly aggressive and disruptive behavior from the galleries before now, it will only intensify as the Ryder Cup gets closer and geopolitical tensions ratchet up. This will be the first Ryder Cup in the U.S. with a full complement of visiting European fans in attendance since Hazeltine in 2016, and that affair did not receive high marks for fan decorum even in a region not known for rowdiness.

It will also mark the first Ryder Cup played on U.S. soil with Trump in office. The 2016 event took place before he was elected and the 2020 match at Whistling Straits was postponed by the pandemic until 2021 after he lost the election.

Having recently attended both the Super Bowl and the Daytona 500 after his inauguration, the president is very likely to want to make an appearance at the Ryder Cup, which would only magnify the international dynamic of the affair.

Trump attended the final day of the 2017 Presidents Cup at Liberty National across the river from NYC in New Jersey, presenting the trophy to the winning U.S. team. The only other time a sitting president attended the Presidents Cup was in 1996, when Bill Clinton was on hand during the opening round to see Arnold Palmer captain the U.S. team against Greg Norman’s International squad at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Virginia.

Neither one of those presidential appearances at an international team golf competition held the same tension despite the unpopularity of those sitting presidents with their rival political parties. The landscape has only gotten darker and more polarizing since, and the global anxiety wasn’t nearly as on edge as it is in 2025.

It is not unreasonable to worry that tensions could erupt into something beyond just rude name calling, as fans of not only opposite teams but opposite sides of the political aisle will be sharing the same space and the same alcohol on sale. There is a genuine risk to underestimate that potential for escalation into violence considering the tinderbox that is the current state of geopolitical as well as domestic relations.

Booing the respective anthems and players will be the least of the Ryder Cup’s worries.