Marc Leishman's wife hits back at US fans' behaviour at Presidents Cup

While the Americans enjoyed another resounding victory in the recent President's Cup  International team competition, their fans are still getting critiqued.

Marc Leishman’s wife Audrey authored Tuesday a blog post entitled “This is not the TOUR I know,” an entry in which she made it clear she did not appreciate the U.S. fans’ behavior at the Presidents Cup.

Audrey was born in Italy but grew up in Virginia and feels she’s “an American through and through.” So while her husband, an Aussie, may’ve been part of the Internationals’ 2017 Presidents Cup road squad, Audrey shared a nationality with the home crowd.

And she did not hold back on her fellow Americans.

“There were many times last week that I thought about what the kids were seeing,” Audrey wrote. “The crowds booing for good shots and cheering for missed putts. The drinking at 7am? Screaming ‘Big Easy’ to Ernie Els and begging for his autograph and then yelling at his players. Heckling a wife for her beauty and then her husband for his play. I was thankful my boys weren’t there to see the way people were treating their daddy. Their hero. My parents could simply turn the television off.”

Audrey certainly raises some poignant critiques here. As she makes clear in this post, Audrey wants people to come together. She makes clear early in the post the beauty of her mixed heritage – an American girl, yes, but one raised in Spanish and Filipino cultures.

Thus her especially ardent dismay here. Audrey went on with specifics, describing scenarios such as this one where she felt American fans went too far…

“During the opening ceremony, I was enjoying the Fanatics singing their songs that most people have come to love when I heard an American scream, ‘Speak English!’

1.  What an awful and ignorant thing to say.

2. They were speaking English.

3. Half of the International Team is bilingual. How many languages do you speak?”

This may not be the most heartwarming post, but Audrey doesn’t mince words here. As she notes at the top, this post is a deviation from her positive norm. After all, Audrey has shown she’s generally been appreciative of life after surviving a harrowing near-death experience two years ago.

But this issue is something she seems adamant needs to be publicized. And it’s worth noting that U.S. fans got rowdy enough at last year’s Ryder Cup to earn the disapproval of Rory McIlroy and Sergio Garcia. (And let’s not forget the verbal abuse Danny Willett went through!)

It’s clear that not all fans are doing this, but that doesn’t mean this trend isn’t a problem.

“I understand that this was not every fan,” Audrey wrote. “In fact, I believe that most of the people acting that way were not actually golf fans. Unfortunately, that doesn’t change the fact that they were the loudest and that the people around them did not ask them to stop.”