It’s time again for Sunday Surmising, our (sometime) weekly look at realities in the sports world. And even though the Major League Baseball season comes to an anticlimactic end today, we want to focus elsewhere: the Ryder Cup, where the Americans—both athletes and fans—are once again not proving themselves worthy of much praise. This makes us question whether or not this nation deserves to host major events.

Let’s start with the typical US collapse at the Ryder Cup itself: we’re cherry picking, but since 1985, the Americans have posted just a 6-12-1 mark in the biannual competition, and there is little chance the US golfers are going to pull ahead today to win. Trailing by seven points, the Americans would need a near sweep of Sunday’s 12 individual matches to win. Europeans need to win just 2.5 points today for victory.

Basically, this means in the last 21 competitions since 1985, the US has won just six times. That’s getting your hat handed to you, basically, and the American crowds have been an embarrassment to the nation. We’re not going to recap it here; just Google it for the commentary and details. US sports fans always have acted superior to European soccer hooligans, to wit, but the reality is Americans are more boorish than ever.

Golf used to be a sport of decency, but alas, that is clearly no more in the twenty-first century. We are not here to blame the US athletes for the behavior of the fans in the crowd, but when the American team captain, Keegan Bradley, just calls the fans “passionate”? He’s clearly dropping the ball. The fans are crude, rude, and disrespectful, and we suggest the Europeans think twice about coming back to the US in 2029.

On that note, the Americans are hosting both a World Cup in 2026 (jointly with Canada and Mexico, actually) and Summer Olympics in 2028. Why would any nation want to send their athletes here to tolerate such verbal abuse? If this is what the US sports fandom has devolved into, and nations already are warning their tourists to avoid visiting the American nation, it makes perfect sense for many countries to skip events.

Start with the World Cup: only two Canadian cities and only three Mexican cities are hosting matches, while 11 American cities are hosting—including the same New York area currently putting on the Ryder Cup. The US doesn’t seem to be as passionate about soccer as it is about golf, but the sport of soccer itself tends to breed the stereotypical “hooligan” behaviors, and the American team isn’t going to win it all, either.

So, does that mean fans in American host cities will rain down vulgar profanity at other nations’ athletes just like the European golfers are enduring this week? We really can’t say, and stadiums are much larger than golf courses, meaning the unruly voices may get drowned out by the positive cheers if enough fans from opposing nations bother coming to watch their teams play. This should be interesting to watch happen.

The Olympics in Los Angeles could be worse, especially with the sociopolitical specters hanging over the US right now. If the situation in the American states does not improve over the next three years, the reality is we could be seeing a boycott of the international sporting event not seen since the early 1980s, really. That would be a supreme egg-in-the-face moment for a nation that imagines itself to be a leader in everything.

Ironically, with Americans’ obsession with their individual free-speech rights they don’t even understand correctly, in the legal sense, we do not see this fan behavior changing any time soon before the 2026 World Cup or the 2028 OIympics. US fans are fine with cheaters now, too, and it’s just more of the moral high ground this nation has lost over the last 30-plus years of sociocultural decline over tribalism and such. Sad.