Rory McIlroy marched through the tunnel underneath the huge grandstand behind the first tee on Sunday and strode out into the noonday sun to the accompaniment of loud rock music.
One announcer had already resigned after encouraging the crowd to chant ‘F*** you, Rory,’ as a greeting for the man the US fans have toiled like a gang of demons to dismantle and destroy this weekend.
Her replacement chose a song by The Killers as McIlroy’s entrance music. ‘I’m coming out of my cage and I’ve been doing just fine,’ the band sang and, with that, McIlroy was out in the open again.
Out of one cage and into another. Out of a cage and into a bear-pit, an 18-hole arena that winds through the woods in a picket-fence part of Long Island where tormentors stood at every turn.
A cage that McIlroy walked through defiantly on Saturday as the fan vitriol unleashed by the urgings of US players like Collin Morikawa and Justin Thomas washed over him like foul spittle.
He had won in the morning foursomes with Tommy Fleetwood and in the afternoon fourballs with Shane Lowry, fighting and fighting in the face of so much abuse that state troopers and police dogs had to be drafted in to protect him.
Rory McIlroy returned to the bearpit of Bethpage Black on Sunday after toxic scenes the day before in New York
The Northern Irishman had suffered so much abuse hurled by the crowd additional security was drafted in
Even before his singles match against world number one Scottie Scheffler began at 12.30pm, there was an argument for saying that this Ryder Cup had already been his finest hour, however unexpectedly tight this enthralling match became in its impossibly tense final reckoning.
McIlroy has had many memorable moments in a storied career and I thought I would never see anything better than him completing his career Grand Slam at The Masters in April.
But I walked round Bethpage Black with his matches on Saturday and I saw what he had to withstand and how the fans tried to turn his contests into unfair fights and I have never admired him more.
As he ran the gauntlet, hole after hole after hole, listening to relentless insults about his wife and about him, it was hard to comprehend how he could withstand it. But withstand it, he did.
There were plenty of others who stood tall in Europe’s utter domination of the first two days and Tommy Fleetwood and Tyrrell Hatton were prominent among those who laid the foundations for this slender but magnificent victory.
But it was McIlroy who led the team. It was McIlroy who led by example. It was McIlroy who showed the courage and the strength that lit the way for the rest to shove the taunts of the Americans back down their throats.
So it was close in the end? So what? It was bound to be, given the lengths the Americans were prepared to go to in order to even up the odds. Europe won. They won the Ryder Cup away from home for the first time since the Miracle of Medinah. The margin is meaningless.
When McIlroy came out on Sunday, it looked a little as if the trials of the last two days had taken a toll. Let’s face it, it would have been a surprise if it hadn’t. A lot of his teammates looked the same. They seemed exhausted in the face of the stirring American comeback.
McIlroy looked a little weary at the prospect of another day of golf as an ordeal and a little angry, too. As he walked down the first fairway, the abuse began again. ‘F*** you,’ a lone American voice shouted out as his ball rolled towards the cup on the green.
In other circumstances, this could have been the duel in the sun between the world number one and the world number two that golf has been waiting for and which has never materialised in Majors.
McIlroy played through the noise and led by example as Team Europe posted a formidable lead
But through Sunday the toll of the weekend’s tribulations appeared to show on his game
But it never quite felt as if it turned into that, partly because the US were so far behind when play started that it seemed mad to think there would be any jeopardy in this game until it became clear that Europe was fighting desperately to cling on to what had seemed to be an unassailable position.
Scheffler was having tribulations of his own, too. He had set an unwanted record by losing all of his first four games at this Ryder Cup, exciting comparisons with Tiger Woods, another individual champion who struggled to translate his dominance to the team environment.
His struggles were such that they attracted the attention of some of the European fans struggling to make themselves heard amid the tumult. ‘Have you ever seen Scheffler win a point?’ a gaggle of them sang by the 5th green.
And so McIlroy’s match with Scheffler flickered but it never caught fire. The abuse of McIlroy never quite reached the pitch it hit on Saturday and neither did McIlroy’s play and the two superstars played cat and mouse.
McIlroy took the lead early in the round but Scheffler levelled things up on the 4th and moved ahead on the 10th after McIlroy had been forced to move away from his drive because of heckling from the galleries.
McIlroy hit straight back with a birdie on the 11th but Scheffler moved ahead again on the 14th before the game belatedly burst into life on the 15th green, which perches atop a hill overlooking the course.
Both men had birdie putts. McIlroy’s was from the fringes of the green and he rolled it towards the cup. It paused on the lip before tumbling in and McIlroy let loose a lot of the emotion that he had managed to keep pent up, thumping his chest and pointing to the crowd.
His match against Scottie Scheffler flickered but never truly caught fire as the competition reached its crescendo
As the Americans found some belief Scheffler was able to pull off the vital win to keep faint hope of a comeback alive
But Scheffler rolled his putt in as well and suddenly, for the first time in the entire weekend, European eyes began to look nervously at the scoreboard, which was bleeding red.
Now, at last, against all expectations, the USA players found some belief. Cameron Young beat Justin Rose on the last hole. Justin Thomas beat Tommy Fleetwood on the 18th, too. Now, McIlroy’s match with Scheffler mattered again.
Scheffler holed a six-foot par putt to hold on to his slender lead going on to the 18th tee and then McIlroy drove his tee shot into the bunker. He needed to hole a 40ft putt from the fringe of the green to have a hope of halving the game and he pushed it three feet wide.
McIlroy looked empty. He lost his singles but in so many other ways this weekend, the victory was his.
