Are pro golfers getting angrier, or are we just always recording?

New York Times

3 days ago

A recent major champion stands on the third tee at Riviera Country Club. It's the second round of one of golf's marquee events, and he hits a poor drive, the kind of shot at the wrong moment that just sets you off. He can't stand it. He smashes his driver into the nearby cart path, so hard the driver head explodes. Shrapnel flies into the crowd. One large chunk shoots just by a spectator and continues into a nearby fairway. Chaos.
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The spectator and her husband shout at the player. So do other gallery members. He mumbles an apology.
The PGA Tour finds out. It sends a letter of inquiry to the player. He doesn't respond for at least two weeks, is hit with a hefty fine and must pen a letter of apology to the spectators he nearly hit. It's an embarrassing public moment for both the player and the tour.
Amidst the last few months of viral golf explosions, unconvincing apologies and a dramatic banishment from one of golf's most iconic venues, you might be assuming this is a story from the summer of 2025. You might be wondering if it was Wyndham Clark, or Rory McIlroy, or perhaps Tyrrell Hatton.
Nope. This was 1992. And it was the 1989 Open Championship winner Mark Calcavecchia.
The great Bobby Jones, the winner of the Grand Slam and creator of Augusta National, a man who tore up his scorecard at the 1921 Open Championship and walked off in anger during the third round, once said, 'I would forgive almost any behavior in a man when he has a golf club in his hand.'
That's the topic at hand this summer, because suddenly golf-adjacent temper tantrums are jumping the shark from funny little anecdotes to viral, controversial talking points. It's the summer McIlroy, two months after the crowning achievement of his career, threw clubs and smashed a tee marker at the U.S. Open. A week later, five-time major winner Brooks Koepka was caught doing the same.
Wyndham Clark, two years removed from a U.S. Open win that thrust him into stardom, has done the most damage, quite literally. His driver's biggest impact at the PGA Championship was the hole it left in a T-Mobile sign, which just happens to be one of his sponsors, and who tried to save him by turning it into an activation. He was not so lucky at the U.S. Open, where he destroyed a locker and was asked by Oakmont Country Club to not return until, among other things, he undergoes anger management therapy.
🚨🗡️🤬 #WATCH — Wyndham Clark broke his driver w/ a violent outburst at the PGA. Marshall (@CMDeiulio11) who was standing nearby took to X: 'I'm the Marshall holding the flag. Scared me to death.' T-Mobile signage was broken, a company who sponsors Clark. pic.twitter.com/ksKbrFCQlw
— NUCLR GOLF (@NUCLRGOLF) May 19, 2025
This is the summer that golf outrage became a thing. But if you ask anybody around golf the past half century, they'll tell you the only difference between now and then is that everybody is making a big deal of it.
'This story has been going on since the time of professional sports,' says Billy Andrade, age 61 and a four-time PGA Tour winner. 'This isn't anything new.'
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Why is it so much bigger now? Cameras. Social media. Outrage culture. Pick one. The fact it used to be a luxury to get an entire tournament round on TV, but nowadays between Golf Channel, ESPN+, Peacock, NBC and CBS, you can theoretically watch every minute of a round from the first group to the last. It's all right there for us to see, and in turn it's all right there for somebody to record and post a clip online to get clicks and attention.
But is any of this actually any worse than before?
Tommy Bolt, a 1958 U.S. Open winner, is more famous for his on-course antics than the golf itself. They called him 'Terrible Tommy,' constantly throwing clubs into the water or cursing up a storm. Tour officials created new rules because of his behavior. One time, he cursed so much that officials informed him of a $100 fine for each expletive. As the old story goes, Bolt pulled out his wallet, grabbed $500, and turned to each official to say, 'F— you, f— you, f— you, f— you and f— you' while handing each of them a $100 bill.
'It thrills crowds to see a guy suffer. That's why I threw clubs so often,' Bolt once told Golf Digest. 'They love to see golf get the better of someone, and I was only too happy to oblige them. At first I threw clubs because I was angry. After a while it became showmanship, plain and simple.'
Brandel Chamblee recalls playing with a golfer who once hooked his drive into the water. Chamblee and the rest of the group started walking, only to turn around when they heard a slight hissing noise. The man had unzipped his pants and begun urinating on his driver.
'If any of these were nowadays, now everybody is a journalist, and these all would have gone viral and people would have thought tour pros were a bunch of babies,' Chamblee said.
Steve Pate and Thomas Pieters have both broken clubs around the back of their neck. Woody Austin banged his putter against his head over and over until it bent. John Huston played the final two holes of a U.S. Open qualifier with a hastily-made tourniquet, after the shaft of a tossed club ricocheted back and stabbed him in the arm.
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Two-time U.S. Open winner Curtis Strange was so mad during a 1982 tournament at Doral that as he walked behind his caddie Gene Kelley, he impulsively kicked the bottom of the bag Kelley was carrying. Both went flying to the ground. Kelley needed surgery to fuse two vertebrae and later sued Strange; They settled out of court.
Jose Maria Olazabal punched a wall at the 1989 U.S. Open, breaking his hand and forcing himself to withdraw.
Oh, and smashing tee markers?
'The place you want to do it is the Hawaiian Open with actual real pineapples,' Andrade said.
So many golfers lay claim to smashing those pineapples at Waialae Country Club in Honolulu at the event now called the Sony Open. Corey Pavin. Brad Faxon. Craig Stadler. Calcavecchia. Imagine the sight of Stadler, known as The Walrus with his big, droopy, mustache, thinking it was plastic as he smashed the pineapple and instead covered himself in pineapple pulp. Calcavecchia remembers hitting one and spraying the poor marshal nearby.
Most of these stories, if they didn't end up involving lawsuits or fines, were simply told after the fact, locker room and barroom tales passed around between golfers. Most golf writers around in those days simply didn't write about them, not because they were covering for golfers or scared to. It just wasn't news. It's something that happens on golf courses all the time.
Chamblee has become something of golf's moral voice over his decades as a Golf Channel analyst, a smart, insightful former pro who enjoys pontificating on larger issues in the game. So, yes, he was on the broadcasts as criticism mounted this summer over McIlroy, Clark and the rest. He says he didn't want to criticize any of those actions too heavily, because he knew he had done the same things, if not worse. The difference was he wasn't the kind of star who always had cameras on him, so most went unnoticed.
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Chamblee does concede it is happening more often. And it definitely happens more often with the biggest stars. He has a multi-point theory for why that is.
• One: More documentation. The mere fact there are so many people with phones, so many people watching at home and rushing to clip anything they can to get it online to go viral. Simply, there are more eyeballs.
• Two: Easier equipment replacement. Golfers used to sometimes go their entire careers with the same driver. There was a mystique to finding the perfect shaft that worked for you. You'd think twice about breaking any club, because it might take you years to ever have your equipment that dialed. Nowadays, golfers can walk over to the equipment truck and order up a new driver like it's a food truck burrito stand.
• Three: Money. In both ways. A $100,000 fine for Calcavecchia was deflating. That was a fifth of his total earnings most years. Now, these stars are worth tens of millions, if not more. No fine can even put a dent in their life. But it works both ways. They are also playing for so much money that the tensions can escalate.
• Four: Tiger Woods.
This is perhaps the most interesting. You see, each generation of golfers looks up to one or two before them. It sets the tempo for how that generation acts. Jack Nicklaus famously never broke a club in tournament play. Tom Watson is known as golf's great gentleman. If Ben Hogan or Arnold Palmer ever lost it on a golf course, no one thought to write it down.
But Woods didn't worry about any of that. He cursed, threw clubs and made scenes, all while being the most televised, closely watched golfer in history.
'As much as we like to talk about the influence of Tiger Woods, I like to call a lot of the younger players today 'Tiger's progeny,' and they grew up watching him lose his mind,' Chamblee said. 'He was the greatest golfer anybody had ever seen, and it clearly didn't bother him in any meaningful way in terms of how he played. He'd blow up, and he'd get over it. So I felt like those outbursts were, to a large extent, normalized.'
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Woods was criticized by golf's elder statesmen for his behavior, with Watson saying Woods 'has not carried the same stature' of other great players before him.
None of these people are coming out and saying Woods was a bad example as a whole, but they are conceding that it became even less taboo these past 30 years. Now, you look at the best players in the game, and nearly all of them lose it sometimes.
World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler is known for his ability to keep cool through 72 holes, but he throws absolute fits on the course. He slams his clubs, throws balls into the trees and rants to himself constantly. Jon Rahm underwent constant scrutiny earlier in his career for his tantrums, and still goes viral frequently for an expletive-laced outburst. Broadcasts always have a microphone on Tyrrell Hatton, hoping for a viral soundbite of him scolding himself or criticizing the course.
In reality, this is all a conversation about frames, both in what images we place inside the frame and how to frame them altogether.
Bolt was funny. His outbursts got covered, because most people got a kick out of them and it added to his legend. Tennis great John McEnroe was funny. Even Hatton now is funny, rarely criticized for his rants as much as highlighted to show his quirks. Most viral videos of golfers smashing tee markers are posted tongue-in-cheek with a caption like, 'See, even the pros are like us.'
As Chamblee put it, Wyndham Clark's outbursts aren't funny to people. McIlroy is a lightning rod for discourse, and those who hate him will use it as a 'gotcha' moment in a way they simply would not for so many others.
U.S. Open winner Graeme McDowell took to social media the day of Clark's locker room rampage to say, 'This is minimal regards what I've seen other players do,' adding it's often from 'players you'd never expect.'
Because in reality, none of this is new. Players threw tantrums 100 years ago, and they'll continue to 100 years from now.
The only thing that may change is how we feel about it.
(Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; Andy Lyons, Simon Bruty / Getty)
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