At the Open, golf’s fan crisis reaches an uncomfortable tipping point

BIRKDALE, England — The golf world went home from Shinnecock last month with one very uncomfortable question.

Why are golf fans behaving like that?

Jordan Spieth needed only a few days to find the answer.

“Betting in golf is something that’s going to have to be tackled here soon,” Spieth said days after Wyndham Clark’s decidedly confrontational final-round victory at the U.S. Open, casting the problems of the sport’s galleries on an impressively simple boogeyman.

Legalized gambling is still a gleaming-new development in American pro sports. In 2018, the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic officially opened the door for the practice to spread across the United States legally, beginning a gold rush of well-funded legal sportsbooks and sports betting apps, and imperiling the employment status of a nation full of bookies.

The suggestion that gambling might have some adverse effects upon polite society is less novel. In fact, much of the reason for gambling’s initial century of shunting away from the public eye (and into the smoke-filled phosphorescence of Las Vegas’ casino floors) came back to concerns about safety, with Americans particularly worried about the integrity of their sporting events.

The eight years following that Supreme Court decision have done little to disabuse us of those concerns. Almost overnight, betting has reached near-ubiquity in American life, dominating television advertisements and app stores and idle behaviors. According to one study, nearly two times as many Americans have placed a bet in the last year (57 percent) as have read a novel or short story (38 percent).

In the sports world, these changes have arrived like a tidal wave, altering not just our perception of lines, scores, and players but also our very vernacular around the games we watch, as Clark himself reminded us on Tuesday.

“The amount of times we hear guys in tournaments saying, ‘Oh, Wyndham, I have you 30-to-1 to win this week or 100-to-1, I’m betting on you,’” Clark said. “That happens all the time.”

For those with eyes and ears, it is callous to suggest that sports betting has not altered something about the way Americans watch golf. In the world of instantaneous bets, golf is unusually vulnerable — a sport whose constant action, intimacy and rules of decorum provide the viewer with an inordinate amount of power to alter the outcome of a shot or moment.

“I would say every golfer that’s played a professional tournament has had a message of abuse from someone that is related to gambling,” said Matt Fitzpatrick.

But there is just one problem with taking Spieth’s word as gospel — with blaming all of the sport’s recent behavioral problems upon betting. A problem that hangs over the Open Championship like a bright-yellow 18th hole leaderboard: Sports betting is legal here, too.

It does not take long after arriving at the Open — any Open Championship — to realize something is different about the way golf is consumed in the UK. Fans do not scream and heckle. They do not joust or deliver brain-dead screams in the follow-through. The ones above driving age do not beg for attention from players.

You don’t need to take my word for it, though. Listen to any of the players in the field this weekend or any weekend at the Open, all of whom agree annually and with tiresome unanimity: These are the best crowds anywhere in golf.

“You don’t have to hit it to three feet to get a round of applause. I think that’s what players really like, hitting a really good shot with a cross-wind to 15, 20 feet, the crowd really acknowledge that,” Justin Rose said. “I think that’s one of the things we love the most about this tournament.”

If betting is the boogeyman it is made out to be, then how is it that the crowds are so good at the Open, held annually in the country where sports betting has been fully legalized since 1962? And held this week in the small town of Southport, where sportsbooks presently operate in no fewer than 15 brick-and-mortar establishments?

“Look, we’ve had gambling over here for forever,” Rory McIlroy said Tuesday. “I would say the crowd behavior has been pretty good for the most part.”

This is the contradiction that hangs over golf as the attention turns to the final tournament of the 2026 major season. Almost everybody agrees that something must be done to rectify the behavior that has become all too common at events over the last 12 months, where players and the crowd have engaged in what could only be called the physical manifestation of an internet comments section. But the easiest solution — gambling — is only a half-measure.

To be clear, nobody is advocating to do nothing about the gambling issue facing pro golf; it is as large and as serious as any issue facing the sport over the next several decades. But at the Open Championship, we are forced to face an uncomfortable tipping point in the argument: What if gambling isn’t the entire solution?

“Things have evolved,” Justin Rose said. “I think people have access to how they’ve seen moments unfold on the golf course or other behaviors, crowds behaving, and it becomes the norm. Everything becomes normalized.”

The human brain is a fundamentally lazy organ. Over time, human beings have developed what researchers call “simplicity bias” — choosing to believe simple solutions largely because understanding complex ones involves a lot more cognitive exertion.

At the Open, though, we can face the problem of fan behavior with no such simplicity. There is something different about American golf events in 2026, and that thing is likely about more than just the betting app on your phone. It is about something deeper in our mid-2020s culture, and very likely something uglier.

“I think it’s just the way of the world at the moment for sure,” Rose said. “Everything is much more accessible. People feel like they’re a lot more part of the moment and can influence the moment. We know about sports betting. We know about this whole other narrative, and people are coming much closer — more closely involved, I think, in the outcome.”

The golf world can forget about its worries for at least a week. It’s likely to be another pleasant weekend from the stands at Royal Birkdale, as it always is.

But if you were hoping for an easy answer to golf’s crowd problems, you might leave disappointed. The questions sound more polite when they’re asked over here, but the answers are just as uncomfortable.