“What are you doing, dear?” My wife asked me this while I sat watching the Ryder Cup yesterday. “Ahh, just sitting here crying with Cam, Justin, Scottie, and all the lads,” I told her. Then I rewound and made her watch Cameron Young hole a putt to win his match. I couldn’t believe he made the putt again, and I got choked up all over again.

At Bethpage, it wasn’t just putts dropping. It was men collapsing into one another, tears spilling in real time, teammates locking eyes as if to say, we did this together or not at all. The Ryder Cup strips away golf’s usual solitary armor. Suddenly, stoic professionals—accustomed to quiet galleries and polite applause—are swept up in something more violent, akin to the Chiefs versus the Eagles.

New York fans only fueled it. They confront for sport—on subways, in delis, and yes, on fairways. The PGA knew this when they slotted Bethpage into the rotation. Sell $20 cocktails in a plastic Ryder Cup to a Long Island crowd and it’s like storing gasoline in a furnace closet. They weren’t just choosing a course. They were choosing chaos. And if New York supplied the chaos, Europe supplied the counterweight.

Across the pond, the Europeans have turned the Ryder Cup into something else entirely: a brotherhood forged in defiance. Year after year, they play as a single body, a collective heartbeat. It is remarkable, really, how seamlessly they come together. America, for all its stars, struggles to match that cohesion.

How do you keep all of that—the roaring, the tears, the body-slamming joy—without slipping into crassness? That’s the puzzle. Maybe it’s impossible to script. The Ryder Cup thrives on the tension between theater and decorum. The PGA probably counts on a little chaos, because without it, the Cup wouldn’t feel alive.

Golf, in its normal state, is solitary. A player, a ball, and a mind in changing states of poise and panic. It’s outbursts—Nicklaus raising a putter to the sky jogging away from the hole on the 16th at Augusta in 1975. Ben Crenshaw winning the 1995 Masters, dropping his hat and putter, elbows on knees, face in his hands, weeping. Payne Stewart winning the U.S. Open with a putt on the final hole, followed by a knicker-kneed fist pump. The classy and the emotional are what make golf so compelling.

It isn’t that decorum should never be violated. What must not be lost is respect for those with whom we play. It is why we shake hands on the first tee, remove our caps on the 18th green, compliment our opponents’ best moments, and even console them when they lose. But the Ryder Cup, and this sport that prides itself on civility and poise and genteel manners, sometimes erupts into operatic chaos.

At Bethpage Black, the emotion was unbearable in the best way. Men weeping openly, collapsing into each other’s arms, grabbing their teammates’ faces as if they had just returned from war. Bryson DeChambeau nearly dislocated a knee jumping about after a made putt. Shane Lowery made the clinching putt to keep the Cup with Europe and instantly morphed into a dancing circus bear juggling frosted donuts. The Ryder Cup has become a theater where golf’s usual stoicism is stripped bare, and what remains is the raw joy and agony of belonging to something larger than oneself.

Of course, some of the electricity crossed wires and sparked into ugliness. But that’s part of the spectacle. The pros aren’t paid a dime. They play for something harder to name—belonging.

And so the Ryder Cup endures because it balances on this knife-edge—between decorum and delirium, chaotic theater and traditional grace. How do we capture such drama while holding on to our dignity? Maybe the truth is we can’t. Maybe part of the allure is that it resists control. The Ryder Cup, at its heart, is proof that golf—usually so genteel—can make us rewind and say to someone who doesn’t even play the game, “Watch this!” This guy makes a putt in his home state on a course he grew up playing, and all his New York friends who barely know him go nuts, and his dad comes and hugs him, and then he chest bumps his caddie, and then a dancing bear break dances on the green, and the welling hope of victory within our hearts is quieted. This is why we watch every two years, even when we lose. You can’t make this stuff up.