FARMINGDALE, N.Y. – European Ryder Cup Captain Luke Donald is leaving no stone unturned in an effort to prepare his team for a road match at Bethpage Black beginning on Friday. That includes the use of virtual reality headsets to simulate the inevitable boos and verbal abuse from a raucous crowd.
“It is just to simulate the sights and sounds and noise,” Rory McIlroy said last week in the lead up to Ryder Cup. “That’s the stuff that we are going to have to deal with. So it’s better to try to desensitize yourself as much as possible before you get in there. You can get them to say whatever you want them to say. So you can go as close to the bone as you like.”
New York fans are notoriously tough on their opponents and a partisan crowd is expected to root, root, root for the home team. There are some concerns that the fans this week could cross the line. McIlroy said that Donald handed the devices to players at a team gathering ahead of the BMW PGA Championship in England. It allows players to visualize the course while adjusting the noise from outside the ropes.
“I think my job as captain is to prepare the guys for every scenario,” Donald said on Tuesday. “There’s a bunch of us in our team that have experienced away crowds. Maybe not New York, but we have experienced away crowds before, and we’ve certainly talked about it as a group, what you’ve learned, what you think you might have done well, what you think you might have changed.”
Justin Rose, 45, is the elder statesman on Team Europe and was part of the last victorious team on U.S. soil in 2012 near Chicago.
“I think the VR headsets have been a thing. But for me personally, it was a great idea, but I wouldn’t say I’ve spent more than five minutes using them, if I’m honest,” he said. “I think it was really, really interesting to put them on and get the feeling of what it was going to look like, obviously, with the 18th and the wraparound and the 1st and the stands and how a full Bethpage could look and feel. I had more fun showing my family. Some people who aren’t going to be here, my son, my daughter, my mom. Like this is what the first tee is going to feel like. That was really cool from that point of view.
“Obviously it’s VR, and it was the overlaying of just the U.S. chants and things like that. So worth doing, for sure, but a soft serving of it, let’s put it that way.”
Rasmus Hojgaard, the lone Ryder Cup rookie for Europe, said he tried them on and found it useful to get a mental picture of what the first tee would look like.
“It was a fun little gimmick from the team,” he said.
As the top-ranked European and No. 2 in the world, McIlroy often has been an easy target of verbal abuse from American fans. He said the VR equipment would help his team be better prepared for the onslaught of insults but nothing can compare to the real thing.
“Nothing can really prepare you until you’re actually in that. You can wear all the VR headsets you want and do all the different things we’ve been trying to do to get ourselves ready, but once the first tee comes on Friday, it’s real, and we just have to deal with whatever’s given,” he said.
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: European Ryder Cup team virtual reality headsets Bethpage rowdy fans
