Controversial Ryder Cup announcer has a lot to say about her own big gaffe and 'feral' vibe at Bethpage Black
Any comedian who’s stood on a stage in front of 20 or 2,000 people knows the risk they take when the lights go on. They have no idea how it’s all going to go down. Will the audience laugh uproariously? Lurking in the shadows, is there a drunk heckler who won’t shut up? Or probably the worst of all: Will they shrug and snore?
Heather McMahan, a veteran American comedian with thousands of miles logged on the road, knew the stakes when she was hired by the PGA of America to be a first-tee emcee for last week’s 45th Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black on Long Island. As a big fan of the game—“The Ryder Cup’s my thing; golf is my sport”—she was thrilled to accept, even though her husband thought she was a little bit nuts in taking on an assignment that would put her in front of thousands of New Yorkers for a sporting event that is wildly charged, highly partisan and increasingly tense.
McMahan was all in, until the event and the crowd and one very “horrible” mistake on her part made it a complete nightmare she’s going to re-live for years.
Early on Saturday morning, in front of a full grandstand with thousands of people, a sing-song chant went up of “F—k you Rory.” The Irish golfer, Rory McIlroy, had already been the target of ridicule and vulgar comments from the gallery on Friday, and things figured to get amped up on the weekend after Europe took a commanding early lead.
Video and audio from that morning show that McMahan did not start the chant but repeated it one time into her microphone over the public address system. But the story blew up throughout the day as McIlroy and all of Europe’s players endured various levels of abuse, and McMahan ultimately decided not to return on Sunday.
McMahan offered a personal apology to McIlroy on Saturday, but the furor over the situation only grew, and McMahan has been the subject of hateful comments on all forms of social media ever since, across both sides of the Atlantic.
On Wednesday, during her own YouTube channel episode, “Absolutely Not,” McMahan spoke for more than 30 minutes about the experience—about the chaos created on the first tee, how confused she felt, the disappointment in herself for participating in the chant, the horrible messages she received afterward, and how it felt for a sporting event to spiral out of anyone’s control.
“The Ryder Cup is feral. The fans were feral. It was a brutal environment,” McMahan said on the podcast, which she began with a half-joke to her new listeners: “You're probably a 55-year-old Irish man, and you're very angry with me right now, which you're allowed to be.”
There is so much to unpack from McMahan’s comments that we figure it’s best to take it one bite at a time, in mostly her own words.
The buildup
McMahan explained the Ryder Cup to listeners who might not understand it, and added, “Tensions are high, but it's fun and it's funny, and everyone's kind of like rowdy and obnoxious, but it's always been in a positive way. And, unfortunately, this year, I think, it turned pretty sour.”
She described all of the features of the first tee early in the morning—the sun coming up, the energized crowd, the sound of those first drives being struck.
“It's a magical golf moment. So, I was hired to entertain at the first tee and the first Friday we were just kinda getting our feelings of … figuring out the crowd and what we needed to do and what was going on and what the energy was and how to read the room and how to get the mics to work right.
“… And then Saturday came and we came out full throttle. The word I had gotten from the team was we need to get everybody hyped. Team America's coming out. We need to be so outta control, so full throttle in cheers and chants and get everybody to truly pump up the team and get the energy going.”
McMahan said she tried to get the crowd to do positive chants about the American players, but many people booed her.
“These guys don’t want anything to do with it. They’re, like, ‘This is New York; we want to get rowdy.’ And that’s the way it went. The crowd started to get really fratty, really intense, really quick. And I don’t want to speak for everybody in the crowd … there were so many wonderful people there that were being lovely.”
Joining in
Then McMahan made a terrible decision. She joined in for one round of the “F—k you” chant.
“I made the absolute horrible mistake of saying it back to them once. And if you watch the video, I'm kind of like laughing to myself, like, ‘F--k you, Rory?’ I'm just, like, what? And the media took that, spun it and said that I had started all of these chants. I would just like to say … I did not like the energy and the vibe from when that started to happen. I will take full responsibility and sincerely apologize to Rory, Team Europe, for saying that—it was so foolish of me.
“I did not start the chant. I would just like that narrative to get out there. I did not start it. But, anyway, that I had participated in that, even just saying it once was so foolish and silly of me, and as soon as it came out and they started chanting, I was just like, ugh, the energy just shifted. It went from us trying to be fun and funny and like get it going to immediately just was negative and felt really kind of toxic.
“So as soon as I said that, I was like, ‘Ugh, I don't want any part of this. Like this is just getting weird and I don't know how to control this crowd of 4,000 dudes at five o'clock in the morning, shouting crazy s—t. So as soon as that happened, I immediately turned to my producer. I was like, let's just get the DJ to play music. I don't know what to do with this audience right now. So I'm not gonna participate.”
The immediate aftermath
“Somebody from the European tour came over and he was, like, ‘Listen, it's one thing if you guys cuss, we've said that's fine. You can say like, let's f--king go. But nothing directed towards a player. We were, like, ‘heard, understood, Roger that, you got it.’ I will do the best I can to shift the energy fully on the same page. I'll get out the T-shirt cannon, I'll be shooting out free sh--t into the audience and hope that that keeps 'em happy.
“But I was honestly, like, I've been hired as a comedian and I'm not quite sure what I'm supposed to do. I was feeling it out as I went, but I'm, like, am I a cheerleader? I probably would've been better off just like taking my top off at this point. That's how fratty the energy felt and I'm like, this is kind of insane, and I don't really know what I'm expected to do here.”
The backlash
McMahan said she made her apologies on Saturday night, and she and her husband made their way to the airport—rather embarrassingly, she said—in an official Ryder Cup courtesy car. She awoke Sunday morning to headlines about her beginning and leading the McIlroy chant, and also to highly offensive, derogatory and misogynistic social-media comments and DMs.
What sent McMahan over the edge was when people began blaming her for the entire atmosphere at Bethpage.
“Absolutely not. I put my foot down. … I cannot control what 40,000 drunk men at a golf tournament do, much less could I have controlled them that morning, 4,000 of them. Like, it was very overwhelming.
“I have to say something, A lot of these articles, a) didn't have the facts straight and b) explained it as potty mouth, foul-mouthed woman from America. First, you would never call a male comic potty-mouthed or foul-mouthed. So that’s strike one—I’m a woman. But also, like, is this the Salem witch hunt trials—you’re telling me I had so much power over a group of men? You’re telling me that I have that much power that I then told them to go out the rest of the day, continue to drink til they’re absolutely in a stupor and say horrible things to professional athletes? What? That’s where I had to draw the line and be, like, hey, that makes no sense to me.”
Lessons learned
McMahan says that among the lessons she learned was to better understand the specifics of a gig before committing. She said she didn’t realize she would only be a “glorified cheerleader” and was led to understand that she would be doing more—such as celebrity interviews on the first tee and possibly being a part of the Ryder Cup broadcast. None of that happened, and she’s said she’s OK with that.
“I’m happy to roll up my sleeves and have fun and get like everybody pumped up. But it just wasn't feasible in the setting that we were in. It wasn't feasible in front of this crowd. We should have just had the DJ, maybe brought cheerleaders out just to like shake it and get the boys, like seeing what they want. … What I could offer was just not what the first team needed.”
Like any good comedian, McMahan had a nice punchline to all of this. She said she'd like to work with officials in Ireland to do a comedy tour there.
"I'm happy if you need me to stand in the street, put me in a Guinness dunk tank. Would do something to extend the olive branch to the community in Ireland. Do you want to throw soft clumps of Kerry Gold butter at me as I walk through the street as you yell 'F--k you Heather'? I'm happy to do it for a way to make us giggle. We can look back on this and all think we made it through the other side."