Keegan Bradley’s signature Ryder Cup moment came in his first opportunity to make one. It nearly ended with him on the ground, unconscious.

The opening match of his debut Ryder Cup in 2012 rested on Bradley’s putter, facing a lengthy birdie putt on the 15th hole that would emphatically put away the Euros’ top pairing, Luke Donald and Sergio Garcia, and earn the U.S. Team’s first point of the competition.

Bradley’s intensity matched the moment. His gaze was unrelenting. He stalked the putt, stood over the ball and sent it away. The roll looked true from the start. As the ball poured into the left side of the cup, Bradley landed an upper cut fist pump that would’ve knocked out the best in a Boston bar fight. The scream that followed could’ve blown out the bar’s speakers. Bradley locked eyes with partner Phil Mickelson, wrapping him up in a hug. The roars and fist pumps continued as Bradley marched toward the hole.

“I think he is slightly pumped up,” the TV announcer said, tongue in cheek.

That’s when Bradley’s eyes glazed over. Watching back the clip with a keen eye, the moment is visible for a brief second. Bradley’s unfurrowed brow breaks as the American reorients himself, and realizing he’s actually already walked by the hole, he backtracks in a daze to retrieve the ball from the cup and steadies himself with his putter as he walks off the green.

“I yelled so loud I saw stars,” Bradley told PGATOUR.COM. “I was about to pass out.”

It’s the loudest roar Bradley can remember making or receiving. One that he can still hear ringing in his ears 13 years later. That week changed Bradley, forever altering his perspective on his career and goals. Forget everything else in pro golf, he wanted more moments like that. A dozen years later, that obsession led to Bradley’s Ryder Cup captaincy.

In no other event could a putt like Bradley’s on Friday morning of the first session elicit a reaction akin to a major championship-winning celebration. It’s in the atmosphere, channeled by the crowd. It’s become the deciding factor in recent Ryder Cup history, and it’s the main character for this Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black, billed to be as raucous a scene that has existed in the sport. It’s expected to be fervent, joyous, vicious, and, importantly, have a material impact on who wins and loses. In that way, the Ryder Cup is an unmatched, intoxicating spectacle. A three-day event played every two years between 24 players, whose merit and viability are endlessly dissected for the better part of 18 months. An event that shirks the modern trappings of pro golf – money, status, trophies – and relies and thrives on national pride. It’s an exhibition, yet the results push players to tears of joy and heartbreak, spur heated arguments, and linger with players longer than their worst individual defeats. It’s singular in the sport. That is also why it contorts players into a mental pretzel like no other competition. One where Bradley nearly passes out after holing a putt and where the first tee shot is the biggest challenge of the round. It’s a test of skill, yes, yet what dictates the outcome is much more elemental.

The home team has won 11 of the last 13 Ryder Cups, far more lopsided than any talent discrepancy elicits. The domination was once easily explained by a confluence of factors. European and U.S. players historically had distinct skill sets born of the contrasting styles of golf courses played on the DP World Tour, where most Europeans played, and PGA TOUR, where almost all the Americans played. That further emphasized the home team’s ability to set up the golf course to their advantage. Now, a vast majority of the Ryder Cup participants play together on TOUR, and the margins that separate the make-up of each team are razor-thin. Improved team planning has eliminated many of the avoidable blunders that befell previous teams – jet lag, unfamiliarity with the golf course and team camaraderie.

But make no mistake, the gulf between home and away performance has never been wider. The last five Ryder Cups have hardly been a contest come Sunday, with the winning team’s margin eclipsing five or more points. The days of the close Ryder Cup are dead. Forget who wins, a modern-day Miracle at Medinah would just be a Ryder Cup that hangs in the balance with a few matches left.

So what’s left to explain the gap? The crowd’s impact remains the most compelling variable, in its boost to the home team and its negative effect on the visitors. The last Ryder Cup at Marco Simone Golf and Country Club, just outside of Rome, Italy, set the European attendance record, with roughly 272,000 fans in attendance throughout the week. A similar amount is expected to flow through Bethpage State Park this week. PGATOUR.COM spoke to 10 current Ryder Cup participants to understand the influence of the atmosphere and the psychological requirement of channeling it, or ignoring it, to perform.

“Nothing prepares you,” Tommy Fleetwood said.

Before the American audience had time to make a cup of coffee stateside and turn on the TV on Friday’s opening session of the 2023 Ryder Cup, their boys in red and blue had already fallen into a hole that proved to be insurmountable.

Fans woke up groggy, dazed, and befuddled. Not too dissimilar to how the U.S. Team was playing thousands of miles away in Italy. The Europeans swept the opening Foursomes session on Friday with a combination of superior golf that was made even more lopsided by the rapturous crowd that willed their players to better golf and simultaneously thwarted the U.S.’s hopes.

“It was like the greatest day ever,” said Shane Lowry, who won his opening match with Sepp Straka, 2 and 1.

The highlight of the first session came from Viktor Hovland, who jolted the home crowd immediately with a chip-in birdie on the first hole of his and Ludvig Åberg’s match against Max Homa and Brian Harman.

“I just remember seeing the ball go in and thinking, holy ****,” said Hovland, who otherwise blacked out as the European fans went berserk and set the trend for a rapturous opening session. They won comfortably, 4 and 3.

The Europeans played better in that opening session, flat out, but were quick to point out the impact that the atmosphere had. For the away team, every roar is another reminder that you need to do better. Followed by the impulse that you now have to pick up the pieces if others are struggling. There were quite a few roars that morning across the rolling hills of Marco Simone, and it put the U.S. Team on the back foot immediately.

“It was easy to ride the wave from there,” Lowry said.

The impact of the home-field advantage is well-established in sport, where nearly every competition has a home team and an away team. Most studies in recent years show the home team wins around 55% of the time, give or take a few percentage points based on the sport and time period studied. It’s a notable advantage, but it’s not overwhelming.

In golf, it is. Opinions vary as to why, from the infrequent nature of true home-away events (there’s just one per year on TOUR, the Ryder Cup or Presidents Cup in alternate years), to the setup advantages, to simply a small sample that will normalize over time. But the data is striking. The home team has won the Ryder Cup 73% of the time since the competition was changed to players from all of Europe in 1979. The away team has won the Ryder Cup just once in the last 20 years.

Most players subscribe to one of two paths: the small sample theory or the scarcity of national team competitions. While stars like Anthony Edwards, Josh Allen or Shohei Ohtani spend half their games facing the wrath of an opposing crowd, golfers truly face it just a few times in their career. Adapting to that environment takes experience that’s hard to accumulate in golf. Playing for a team is also not in a golfer’s nature, and the pressure that adds is hard to prepare for.

“When you're playing for the entire team, we tend to reach deeper inside of us,” said Dr. Bhrett McCabe, a professional sports psychologist who counts several former and current Ryder Cup members as clients.

In an interview with No Laying Up, Max Homa recalled the nerves standing over a putt to tie his singles match in Italy, and consequently stave off Europe’s clinching point, as feeling, “Like I had 50 phones tied to my legs and everyone was calling me. It was wild."

The scene surrounding the first tee shots hit at the Ryder Cup has become the most nerve-inducing shots in golf. Tiger Woods tried to get out of hitting it in his debut Ryder Cup match in 1997, attempting to switch with his foursomes partner Mark O’Meara, who eventually convinced Woods to hit it. Rory McIlroy said, “I have never felt as nervous over a golf shot as that first tee shot in the Ryder Cup at Celtic Manor.”

Jose Maria Olazabal put it bluntly, “Anybody who doesn’t feel his legs trembling must be a dead man.”

As discussed as the first tee shot has become, it’s not something McCabe spends much time on with his clients. “It’s going to happen before they know it,” he said. Instead, he focuses on making sure his players embrace it rather than shy away from it.

“To be prepared is to allow the emotions of being in front of that crowd, to feel the support, to stand together, unified, and enjoy,” said McCabe. “You're spending more energy trying not to pay attention to it. Allow emotion to be emotion.”

The European team is doing its best to ready its players for what may be hurled in their direction by the American crowd. Rory McIlroy revealed they are using virtual reality headsets to simulate what will likely be shouted at them.

“They’ve put abuse on there for us because that’s the stuff that we’re going to have to deal with,” McIlroy told reporters at the DP World Tour’s BMW PGA Championship. “So it’s better to try to desensitize yourself as much as possible before you get in there. They said, ‘How far do you want us to go (with the level of abuse)?’ And I said, ‘go as far as you want,' … You can get them to say whatever you want them to say. So you can go as close to the bone as you like.”

The Ryder Cup has become ripe for nasty barbs thrown toward the visiting team, feeding into the worst impulses of the patriotic competition that pits one country against another continent. At the 2016 Ryder Cup, hosted in Minnesota at Hazeltine National Golf Club, Englishman Danny Willett became a story for all the wrong reasons after his brother, Pete, penned an article in the lead-up to the event that called Americans, among other things, “fat”, “stupid”, “greedy” and “classless.” That gave the already boisterous U.S. crowd full license to say whatever they wanted back.

“They have been quite poor,” Spaniard Garcia said at the time. “I'm not going to lie.”

The heckling goes both ways. Americans have said similar things about the European crowds over the years. At the 2023 Ryder Cup in Rome, Italy, Patrick Cantlay became the crowd’s punching bag after a Sky Sports report that the U.S. team room was fractured, “a split led predominantly” by Cantlay, who allegedly was refusing to wear a hat as a silent protest. Cantlay dismissed the report, calling it “totally false,” with members of the U.S. Team also refuting the story. But the European fans jumped on the situation, and by Saturday, much of the crowd would take off their hats and wave them in the air at Cantlay.

It’s not exclusive to the Ryder Cup either. Scottie Scheffler said there were “a few things that were said to me in the final round (of the Open Championship) in Ireland that were very far over the line.”

Scheffler’s duel with Robert MacIntyre on the weekend of the BMW Championship last month turned into a mini-preview of what’s to come at Bethpage. MacIntyre repeatedly stepped off shots from hecklers and he glared into the crowd at times. It culminated on Saturday on the 17th hole when MacIntyre holed a par putt and shushed a spectator who yelled while he was putting.

“I'm not going to comment,” MacIntyre said of the crowd’s behavior on Sunday after losing to Scheffler.

That was just a FedExCup Playoffs event, an important moment in the PGA TOUR calendar, but hardly an event that pits nations against each other and intentionally froths up the home crowd to make an impact. What the Ryder Cup would be like in New York has been a talking point since the PGA of America picked Bethpage Black as the venue. It’s no secret the type of sports fandom that New Yorkers exude.

“Extremely passionate,” is how Bradley described it. “I think that multiplies when you're wearing your country's flag on your chest, and I think that multiplies even more when you're playing on their course at Bethpage,” he added.

That’s the unique concoction of Bethpage Black. New York is a haven of prestigious golf, from Shinnecock Hills to National Golf Links of America to Friar’s Head to Maidstone, but Bethpage Black holds a particular piece of New York’s heart. It’s public, open, and ready to host anyone who wants it bad enough to camp out overnight. It’s a piece of New York, and a piece of them. It’s their course. They know how the greens break and where the best place to miss is because they’ve done it too.

It all adds up to an event carrying as much anticipation as any previous. A Ryder Cup that’s just a short train ride from one of the world’s cultural hubs, on one of America’s most-known courses, with the U.S. motivated to continue the run of home team domination and a crowd ready to do its part.

“If I shot you up into space, the only people who are gonna be able to describe it are people who have been up in space,” McCabe said.

We’re ready for liftoff.