Ryder Cup host who heckled Rory McIlroy has regrets but also frustrations

If there’s a single moment that epitomized the R-rated heckling from U.S. fans at the Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black last week, it came early Saturday morning by the first tee, where comedian and podcaster Heather McMahan was playing the role of host and party-starter. Among her duties were engaging with fans in the hulking grandstand behind the 1st tee and 18th green, leading cheers — or trying to — and, as she put it, generally “getting everybody hyped.”

In the lead-up to the first foursomes match that morning, McMahan’s cheerleading included encouragement for Bryson DeChambeau, who was readying to take the tee with his partner, Scottie Scheffler, in their match against Rory McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood.

“DEE-SHAM-BOW!” McMahan began hollering through her mic. “DEE-SHAM-BOW!”

The crowd joined in: “DEE-SHAM-BOW! DEE-SHAM-BOW!”

After several refrains, a cluster of fans drowned out the DeChambeau chant with one of their own: “F— YOU, RORY! F— YOU, RORY!”

McMahan hadn’t started the taunting, but she did participate, barking once into her mic: “F— YOU, RORY!”

As video of the moment began making the rounds on social media, it was a tough look both for McMahan and the event’s organizers, the PGA of America, which had little choice but to relieve McMahan of her duties. On Saturday night, the association issued a 26-word statement: “Heather McMahan has extended an apology to Rory Mcllroy and Ryder Cup Europe and has stepped down from hosting the first tee of the Ryder Cup.”

McMahan herself made no public comments about the incident. That changed Wednesday afternoon when, on the latest episode of her “Absolutely Not” podcast, she detailed her account of what went down.

McMahon said the first-tee energy on Friday — the first day of the matches — was relatively tame as she and her team were still calibrating the mics and generally feeling out how best to work the crowds.  

“And then Saturday came,” she said. “The word I got from the team was we need to get everybody hyped. Team America is coming out. We need to be so out of control, so full throttle in cheers and chants and get everybody to truly pump up the team and get the energy going.”

As fans started filing in just after 5 a.m., McMahon said she started doing “crowd work” — “Where are you from? Massachusetts? OK, you’re from North Carolina. Like, doing that whole thing,” she said. “We got to get the energy up.”

As a stand-up comic, McMahan has experience entertaining big crowds; she has starred in comedy specials on Netflix and Hulu and also had a role in in the 2021 romantic comedy “Love Hard.” But she said her Ryder Cup hosting job laregly didn’t call for those skill sets, which caught her off guard.

“It was frustrating because I thought that the job that I was hired to do was not really what it ended up being in the sense of we were all trying to figure it out together as a team,” she said. “I thought I was definitely gonna be doing more celebrity interviews as the celeb showed up for first tee. I thought at one point I thought it was gonna be on broadcast. That did not happen. And then I was like, OK, so I’m just kind of like a glorified cheerleader.”

McMahon tried to lead a couple of chants with U.S. players’ names, but those efforts, she said, did not go well. ”We’re just getting booed,” she said. “These guys don’t want anything to do with that. … The crowd started to get really fratty, really intense really quick. And I don’t wanna speak for everybody in the crowd. There were so many wonderful people there that were being lovely. But unfortunately, the energy and the way that the crowd moved was just, uh, it was not the vibe.”

And then came her DeChambeau cheer, which devolved into the off-color McIlroy chant, which led to McMahon’s gaffe.

“I made the absolute horrible mistake of saying it back to them once,” she said. “If you watch the video, I’m kind of like laughing to myself. Also, like question mark, like ‘F— you, Rory?’”

She added: “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 was just like that narrative to get out there.”

After the McIlroy chant, McMahon said she felt a shift in energy from the fans, from “fun and funny” to “kind of toxic,” and that she felt overwhelmed by having to control “4,000 dudes at 5 o’clock in the morning, shouting crazy s—.” She said at that point she told her producer and husband, Jeff Daniels, that it would be best if she stepped back from the proceedings and let the DJ take over. She also said a DP World Tour representative tour approached her and said that leading negative chants against the European players was unacceptable, a sentiment with which she agreed.

She said soon after her misstep, she contacted the DP World Tour to apologize both to McIlroy and the European team. She thought that resolved the incident until she woke up Sunday morning to find a torrent of media coverage of a certain Ryder Cup emcee — some of which, she said, inaccurately described her as having started the chant. “It really got blown out of proportion,” she said. “I just want to clear the air that it would never be my intention to be malicious to be gross to even put that kind of energy out there.”

She added: “You’re telling me that I had so much power over a group of men at a sporting event at 5 o’clock in the morning, when I shut down the chant, as soon as the words came out of my mouth, and I was like, What are we doing here, and laugh? You’re telling me that I have that much power that I then told them to go out for the rest of the day continue to drink till they absolutely were 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.”

On Sunday, McMahon said she and her husband were transported to the airport in an official Ryder Cup courtesy vehicle brandished with Ryder Cup logos, the irony of which was not lost on her comic sensibilities.   

“Jeff and I had to laugh about that,” McMahon said. “We were like, this is crazy. I mean, listen, I’ve had a lesson in media. I have learned a lesson in communications. I have learned a lesson in moving forward jobs of just being like I need specific parameters. I need to know exactly what is asked of me.”