Give a guy from Bushwick several hours to day-drink and a chance to yell on Rory McIlroy’s backswing, and it’s going to happen. Garrulous and unseemly noises always seem to break out whenever golf and New Yorkers are adjacent. The organizers of the Ryder Cup have nevertheless brought the famously contentious event to Bethpage Black this weekend for the first time. This municipal course is just 33 miles from Manhattan, setting the stage for a sub-contest: How badly will etiquette collapse in the blood-rush of patriotism, combined with New York sarcasm, concessionaires peddling a vodka-and-grape-juice cocktail named the All-American Transfusion, corporate tents packed with bayingly overserved Wall Street wolves wreathed in Padrón smoke, and the carrack-carrack of packed trains carrying an expected 225,000 comers from across the boroughs and beyond?The 98-year-old biennial Ryder Cup, which pits America against Europe in three days of rare-for-golf team competition, is an emotionally combustible event no matter where it is held. “Tribal,” the American golfer Patrick Cantlay calls it. For golfers accustomed to silence and solemnity, the Ryder Cup’s home crowd is always an opponent in and of itself, along with the course, wind, rain, sand, and rival players. This year’s new locale is even more of a complicator—intensifying an already special intensity. “I think it’s inevitable something is going to happen in New York,” the Northern Irishman McIlroy predicted. “It might not involve me but it is inevitable that something will happen.”Most of the time, golf is a game of stillness, punctuated by the even paces of aloof, buttoned-up athletes who are playing as individuals, for their own wallets. But in the Ryder Cup, great geysers of sound go up. Bellows from the galleries roll across the fairways and right up the necks of the competitors, prickling their hairs. “There’s so much noise that it’s kind of hard to—you can’t hear all of it,” Justin Thomas, on the American team, said before a practice round. A match-turning shot can provoke formerly sedate competitors to almost shirt-ripping exuberance, galvanized by the sensation of playing with and for others, and winning something greater than a purse. For the fan accustomed to golf’s meditative hush, the sensation is like being swallowed by a crashing wave. The noise can also make a player’s normally steady hands tremble, especially if he’s on the visiting team.[From the April 1933 issue: On taking golf seriously]At the 2016 Ryder Cup, at Hazeltine National Golf Club, in Chaska, Minnesota, McIlroy confronted a fan who screamed at him to “suck” his appendage, and admirably held his temper while crowds sang “Sweet Caroline” at him to commemorate his breakup with the tennis player Caroline Wozniacki. McIlroy is right to brace for even worse at Bethpage, given the particular enthusiasm that northeastern sports audiences have for needling the enemy. Some idea of what might happen can be gleaned from the experience that the heavyset Scotsman Colin Montgomerie had with Bostonians at the 1999 Ryder Cup, in Brookline, Massachusetts. They chanted “Mrs. Doubtfire” at him all along the course, echoing a hated nickname given to him by the Irish golf announcer David Feherty. The abuse didn’t affect his play that day, but it did make his father leave the course, and Montgomerie reluctant to compete in the U.S. again. Feherty described him as looking like “a ruptured sofa.”Earlier this month, Team Europe’s captain, Luke Donald, handed out virtual-reality kits to his players so they could try to wrap their heads around what they’re likely to encounter. The English veteran Justin Rose spent a few minutes using the set and then handed it to his kids. The VR provided a nice approximation of the stadium atmosphere at Bethpage, including full bleachers overlaid with the sounds of pro-U.S.A. chants—but “a soft serving of it, let’s put it that way,” he observed. According to McIlroy, no gizmo “can really prepare you” for the thunder that could erupt from a Ryder Cup in New York. But “it’s better to try to de-sensitize yourself as much as possible before you get in there.”McIlroy is likely to be a target of the crowds. Two years ago in Rome, he presided over a wipeout of the Americans and then vowed to repeat the victory at Bethpage. It was an audacious thing to say and will be a difficult promise to keep, given that the home team tends to have a staggering advantage. The Europeans have won on U.S. soil just three times in 30 years—most recently all the way back in 2012. Then there is the typically placid McIlroy’s emotional volatility in the Ryder Cup, which almost invites his audience to hassle him. At Hazeltine during a heated match with Patrick Reed, he held his hand to his ear and hollered, “I can’t hear you!” to the crowd; in 2021, he wept when his team lost, 19–9, at Wisconsin’s Whistling Straits. In Rome, he confronted the American caddy Joe LaCava in the parking lot after a round and had to be held back, believing LaCava had distracted him by waving a cap. His teammate Shane Lowry literally cooled him off by making him take a cold plunge at the team’s hotel. McIlroy acknowledged this history yesterday: “You know, we’re playing in an environment that we are not really used to or we don’t get to play in very often,” he said before his practice round. He continued, “I feel at times in the Ryder Cup, I have engaged too much with that, too much with the crowd.”New York crowds know that McIlroy is Team Europe’s true leader, its tuning fork, and its best and most experienced Ryder Cup player, with seven previous appearances. “He’s just kind of like the figure in the room,” Lowry said. Break him, and you might break the whole team.[Read: Why do rich people love quiet?]The Europeans won’t be without vocal support. They have their own mocking aural tradition that comes from a group of superfans called the Guardians of the Cup, formed in 2002 by English university students who rewrite well-known songs and spread them through pro-Europe crowds. “The chants, I don’t know how the Europeans do it,” Justin Thomas said. “It’s really impressive, to be honest. I don’t know if there’s, like, a group text of 10,000 people that they just come up with these things.” In fact, the Guardians do have a website (“Our inability to sing is no obstacle to our ambition!”) where they prep fans with their latest creations and log some of their greatest hits. Such as this chant for McIlroy, to the tune of the Carpenters’ “(They Long to Be) Close to You”: “Why do birdies suddenly appear / Every time he is near? / On the tee, Me and Ro-ry Mc-Il-roy.” And an adversarial lyric has been devised, aimed at the top-ranked American Scottie Scheffler. It’s set to Shania Twain’s “That Don’t Impress Me Much.” (“So you’ve got the length but have you got the touch?”)But songs will likely be no match for the goading from New Yorkers. Three major championships have been held at Bethpage, not without incident or creative chaos. During the 2002 U.S. Open, thousands of New Yorkers taunted Montgomerie for his sensitivity to American crowd abuse with Be Nice to Monty buttons. They tormented Sergio García of Spain by chant-counting how many times he nervously regripped his club—up to 24—and jeered him as “Waggle Boy,” until he delivered the finger. By the end of the 2009 Open, a braying heckler had complimented Vijay Singh on his posterior, and the United States Golf Association cut off alcohol sales early. During the 2019 PGA Championship, the multitudes even taunted the American Brooks Koepka when he bogeyed four straight holes in the final round before winning. “It’s New York, what do you expect?” he said afterward.As their treatment of Koepka in 2019 shows, New York audiences are hard on a well-paid choker, and should the Americans trail early this weekend, things could get nasty. “The New York crowd is different to any other because they will jeer their own,” Montgomerie observed in a column he wrote in 2009. “The people on the Eastern Seaboard don’t come out to watch golf, they come out to be a part of it. They want to get involved, to shout, to be in the mix.” Which raises the question: If that’s what they will do to a fellow citizen, what will they do to the Europeans? “Countries,” the great golf writer Bernard Darwin wrote for this magazine in 1929, “have a habit of believing themselves to be right.”New Yorkers know the ground at Bethpage Black well. It’s a public course in a state park, and is known as “The People’s Country Club.” It costs just $70 for state residents to play on weekdays and $80 on the weekends, and the parking lot tends to be packed with people who are willing to sleep in their car to get a tee time, and who cheer for great golf shots like they are home runs. Locals think the course is theirs, with a pride of possession that is almost moral. Team Europe won’t conquer it without a very loud fight.