How did a fresh-faced Irish superstar become the lightning rod of the moment in pro golf?

This weekend’s rowdy, raucous Ryder Cup soap opera was the Rory McIlroy show. The single biggest media story this weekend was the verbal abuse hurled by New York fans at McIlroy and other European players. The biggest media story since has been McIlroy’s public response. Especially since the five-time major champion gave as good as he got with drunken fans. 

Either way, McIlroy is the x-factor. When did the eager-to-please kid with the floppy head of curls become a cartoon villain for some golf fans? 

Scottie Scheffler is golf’s best player. But he’s admittedly bland, mechanical. McIlroy’s the opposite. He’s opinionated, mercurial, unpredictable. The 36-year-old superstar doesn’t care whether you like him.

As evidenced during the height of the PGA Tour vs. LIV Golf rhetoric and now at the Ryder Cup, McIlroy’s become the loudest voice in golf. As Tiger Woods fades away, the 2025 Masters champion is the most vital voice, too. 

After Team Europe’s victory, a high-handed McIlroy warned about the “unacceptable and abusive behavior” from fans at Bethpage Black Golf Course. “I don’t think we should ever accept that in golf. I think golf should be held to a higher standard than what was seen out there this week,” he said.

Good point. No athletes should face the type of abuse hurled by those yahoos this weekend. As Front Office Sports’s David Rumsey wrote, the PGA of America still has to explain how it let this year’s Ryder Cup spin out of control, both on and off the course. 

But McIlroy was no choir boy, either, at Bethpage. As early as Friday, the fighting Irishman was bluntly telling hecklers to “shut the fuck up” in a video that quickly went viral. At another point, TV cameras captured McIlroy gleefully pointing his finger at the crowd—and hurling f-bombs, as well as swiftly directing security to throw out a fan who called him a slur. Did McIlroy arrive at Bethpage with a chip on his shoulder? Maybe so. Even Golf.com asked whether he was a hypocrite for his criticism of fans. 

Paul Azinger, the former U.S. Ryder Cup captain, admires McIlroy. He credits the European superstar for turning down $500 million from rival LIV to stick with the American PGA Tour. But McIlroy wants it both ways, according to the Zinger.

“After it’s over, he is saying I think golf should be held to a higher standard of decorum. … But in the meantime he says, ‘Eff you, eff you, eff you,’ in full voice for the world to see. He turns around and says to the guy, ‘Shut the eff up.’ The guy in the media asks him today, ‘How did that feel, Rory, to tell the guy to shut the eff up, and then hit it to two feet?’ And he said, ‘It felt pretty effin’ good,’” the former NBC analyst told Drew Stoltz on the Subpar podcast.  

“And I’m like, ‘Which is it, Rory?’ Is it that golf is held to a higher standard? Or are you just going to ‘eff you’ the fans and act like that’s O.K.?’ I love Rory. You know that. But you can’t say that. You can’t say the fans need to behave better and then, in the meantime, lay them to waste. You can’t do both. You’ve got to be one or the other. You can’t do both.”

On the other hand, the outspoken Brandel Chamblee believes McIlroy handled himself with class this weekend. The superstar put up with the abuse at first, the Golf Channel analyst said on his Favorite Chamblee podcast. But when hecklers hit McIlroy with homophobic slurs and mocking innuendos about his relationship with CBS announcer Amanda Balionis, and even threw a drink on his wife, Erica Stoll, he hit a “boiling point,” according to Chamblee. “They were hurling insults at Rory’s wife. She never brought it up to anybody like she was aggrieved or anything, which all class to her, all credit to her,” Chamblee said.

Ever since McIlroy won the 2011 U.S. Open at the precocious age of 22, he’s received fawning media coverage. But that’s not enough. Remember McIlroy bluntly reminding golf press at The Masters this year that he and other players are not obligated to speak to them after a round. If the press doesn’t like it, they can lump it.  

Legends like Jack Nicklaus would beg to differ with his approach to the media. But it’s McIlroy’s time now, and he’s doing it his way.

His way also included making himself the defender of the PGA Tour, and that won him a lot of favor with veterans like Azinger, who despite his criticism of McIlroy’s Ryder Cup antics, emphasized: “I love Rory, because Rory stayed and fought for our tour.”

Despite managing to tick off most of the NHL fan community, ESPN announcer Ben McDonald will be back behind the microphone for the network’s telecast of tonight’s winner-take-all Game 3 of the Padres-Cubs NL wild-card series, sources tell Front Office Sports.

The MLB analyst put his foot in his mouth during Wednesday night’s Game 2 telecast when he noted there’s “zero chance” he’ll watch ESPN’s opening night NHL coverage on Oct. 7.

With great fanfare, ESPN returned to NHL coverage during the 2021–22 season via a seven-year, $2.8 billion deal. So it was a natural for the MLB broadcast booth of McDonald, play-by-play announcer Kevin Brown, and analyst Jessica Mendoza to promote the network’s new season of hockey coverage. Except McDonald dropped the ball.

When Brown asked the longtime Orioles color commentator for MASN if the reigning Stanley Cup champion Panthers could three-peat, McDonald shrugged hockey off like an itchy sweater. 

“Are you asking if I’m going to be watching? … There is zero chance I will be watching,” McDonald said. “I’m just going to be honest with you.” 

Then the broadcast booth had one of those uncomfortable chuckles.

McDonald’s dismissive comment quickly went viral, with critics taking aim at the veteran Orioles announcer on social media. 

John Buccigross, the living embodiment of ESPN’s NHL coverage, also sent a zinger McDonald’s way. “Zero is also how many post-season innings Ben McDonald pitched in his MLB career,” Buccigross tweeted. 

In some fairness to McDonald, the bulk of his on-field career with the Orioles and Brewers arrived before the 1995 start of wild-card play in the MLB playoffs, and before then, only division winners qualified.

By Thursday morning, McDonald was doing damage control. He told FS1’s Wake Up Barstool he didn’t know ESPN was in business with the NHL. Given the dates, the choice between watching playoff baseball—or NHL opening night—is no choice at all, he added.

“As far as the hockey stuff goes, man, listen, when that thing popped up on the screen, I’ll be honest, I didn’t even know ESPN had the hockey contract,” he said. 

Even if McDonald truly isn’t a hockey fan, the complete lack of awareness of ESPN’s return to the sport is hard to fathom. Not only has it been more than four years since the network signed its deal in March 2021 with the league, but that agreement has included the complete inclusion of the NHL.TV out-of-market game package into ESPN+ in the U.S. As a result, it’s impossible to open the streaming app during hockey season without seeing the immediate, high-profile placement of NHL games that are happening.

In an interview with The Athletic, McDonald said his controversial comments were a “joke.” He and Brown were chatting before the telecast about their offseason plans. So it was more of an instance of two broadcast partners needling each other rather than a dig at hockey or hockey fans. As an avid hunter and outdoorsman, Brown knows McDonald likes to go off the grid during the offseason.

“This was a joke,” McDonald told The Athletic. “I respect the hockey players, I love them.”

ESPN declined to comment on McDonald. But in a promotional tweet revealing the announcers for tonight’s three key MLB playoff games, he’s listed along with Brown, Mendoza, and Jesse Rogers for Padres-Cubs.

The political writer Michael Kinsley famously defined a “gaffe” as when a politician accidentally tells a truth they’re not supposed to say. McDonald can probably relate.

Pedro Martínez was one of the most ferocious pitchers in baseball history, but he has a soft spot for nature.

Martínez, a member of TBS’s excellent MLB studio show, just signed a multi-year contract extension with TNT Sports, and he spoke to Front Office Sports about his career in broadcasting—and why he loves gardening. 

“I’m a gardener. I can tell you proudly—I’m a gardener,” Martínez said. “I love dealing with my gardens, growing roses, vegetables, and stuff like that. And I also love growing animals like chickens right now in my backyard. There’s a whole bunch of geese because I feed them. I feed them. I shouldn’t do that, but I feed them. I just, I just love to see nature.” 

Martínez attributes his love of gardening to his mother, who would invite him to garden with her as a respite from when he was fighting with his older brother Ramón, who later became an All-Star pitcher with the Dodgers. 

“My mom would just pull me aside. ‘Come here, go with me to the garden, clip my roses,’” Martínez recalled, noting he continued to garden as a way to ease his mind throughout his professional baseball career. “What I used to do before every single game I pitched in Boston, was clip my flowers when I woke up, before I went to the field, and then head over,” said Martínez, who won one World Series with the Red Sox in 2004.

“That was my therapy to start every game, and get myself into the zone that I needed to actually go and pitch. Gardening. You would never guess that one.”

Martínez estimated he has “over 1,000” chickens, and revealed he lives almost entirely off the food he raises on his land in the Dominican Republic. “I like to eat organic. I produce literally everything I eat in the Dominican,” he said. “My mom is a farmer. I have the land to produce whatever I want and I enjoy it. So I have my uncles, my cousins, everybody that knows how to work it, working with it. When I’m not there, they keep growing whatever I left. And I try to eat organic from the things that I grow.”

The Hall of Famer, who played from 1992 to 2009, also finds peace out on the ocean. “I go deep-sea fishing on the open [water] where nobody can reach me, and not even [by] phone,” he said. “I disconnect every time I feel like I’m stressed out.”

When TBS starts airing the NLDS this Saturday, Martínez will be flanked by host Adam Lefkoe and fellow analysts Curtis Granderson and Jimmy Rollins. He admitted that he “never” thought he would work in media, but that he’s kept it up because he’s enamored with the people he’s working with in Atlanta and it gives him a chance to stay connected with the sport he loves.

“The only reason I’m doing it is because they put me in that position where I could feel comfortable. I could express myself, whether it was in English or Spanish,” Martínez said. “I’ve been able to do that, and the fact that they allow me to be me in my own skin and feel so comfortable is probably why I decided to just stay here.”

He praised the people he works with both behind and in front of the camera. “We treat each other like brothers,” Martínez, who joined the TBS crew in 2013, said. 

Asked about the toughest hitters he ever faced, Martínez pointed to players like Edgar Martínez, Barry Bonds, and Derek Jeter, who worked long at-bats with foul balls and a keen eye. 

“Edgar Martínez—I got him out. By the numbers, I did really well. But man, every at-bat was just, you know, the ability that only guys like him, Barry Bonds, and Jeter, had the ability to foul off pitches. And I hated that because I wanted … to finish what I started.”

Having 10- to 12-pitch at-bats would cause Martínez to be “worn out” by the seventh inning, he said. “Barry Bonds was that guy that you just go, ‘How am I going to get him out?’” Martínez recalled. “Let me just make pitches all over the place. Never the same speed. Never the same pitch. Never the same location. And hope that he will go after one of them and hit it right at someone.”