Ryder Cup 2025: Let's take a closer look at the video of Rory McIlroy's wife getting hit with a drink

On Sunday, video of Rory McIlroy's wife being hit in the head with a drink the day before at the Ryder Cup surfaced on social media, where everyone immediately jumped to conclusions given all the vitriol spewed at McIlroy during the course of the day. Upon closer look, the situation does not appear nearly as cut-and-dry as you think.

Let's break it down.

The video:

As you can see, this tweet being just one example, the knee-jerk reaction was that this was an American fan intentionally hurling a drink in anger at McIlroy, a drink that wound up hitting his wife Erica. With reports of the scene turning very ugly Saturday afternoon at Bethpage Black, particularly in the McIlroy group, this was a more than fair assumption. 

Upon closer look, however, this appears to be a group of European fans celebrating as McIlroy makes his way past them. Take a look at the screenshot below, where you'll see the fan holding the beer in his left hand with his left arm around a friend:

That is the drink in question, but the man holding it did not underhand toss it from that position with enough force for it to travel as far as it did. So, what the heck happened? 

One scenario posed already is that it was purely accidental. This was a contingent of understandably rowdy European fans jumping up and down and someone accidentally sent that cup soaring. But again, given how far the drink flew, even that seems hard to believe. 

This second angle didn't make things much clearer:

But now a third, slow-mo, close-up angle has given the whole situation a bit more clarity. In this clip, you can see someone, perhaps intentionally, smack the beer out of the guy's hand and send it flying:

That angle shows someone's arm (looks like a left arm) whack it forward. This is the best screenshot we could come up with in that moment:

So now the questions are, who was it? Were they American or European? Was it an accident or intentional? From those videos and pictures, it's still impossible to tell and not for us to say. What we can definitively say is it's not the guy holding the drink—and that this 2025 Ryder Cup continues to be very dramatic for all the wrong reasons.