In a blog post Tuesday, Marc Leishman’s wife Audrey sounded off on the raucous Presidents Cup fans for behavior she described as “hard on my heart.”
In the post, entitled “This is not the TOUR I know,” Audrey, who describes herself as “an American through and through… raised with Spanish and Filipino cultures,” wrote that she expects better from the U.S. fans.
“When I met Marc, I did not know a birdie from a bogey. I didn’t know anything about any sports really… But over the years I have truly come to appreciate this game,” she wrote. “Golf is truly a gentleman’s sport. But last week was not the golf I know.”
Audrey found several of the crowd’s jokes to be in poor taste and objected to Daniel Berger’s comments about wanting to “crush [the Internationals] as bad as we can.” She wondered about the example being set for young fans.
Audrey wrote: “There were many times last week that I thought about what the kids were seeing. The crowds booing for good shots and cheering for missed putts. The drinking at 7 a.m.? 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.”
Friday and Saturday in particular drew large crowds from the greater New York City area. Leishman himself seemed to be enjoying the contributions of the Fanatics, the International fan group, who serenaded the Aussie with songs such as “Sing us a song, you’re the Leishman,” and “Super Marc Leishman.” The majority of American fans were jovial, patriotic and good-humored, too, but Audrey wrote that a louder minority stole the show.
“By Sunday afternoon when America won, the crowd calmed down some. All of a sudden they liked our guys again.”
As for Marc, Audrey wrote that results aren’t as important to her as the way he conducts himself. “I only care about how he wins and how he loses,” she wrote. “I care that he wins with humility and loses with grace. When Marc shot 40 on the back nine to lose the Dell Technologies Championship he did not throw a fit.”
“America has had a hard year,” Audrey wrote in closing. “Last week was a chance to come together over something so simple, the love of golf. I wish we could have shown our best. With the Statue of Liberty as our backdrop, we certainly should have.”
