Football, golf … behold the future of world sport: Donald Trump as referee-in-chief | Marina Hyde

For so many of us around the world, the final scenes of the World Cup were a chance to switch off the TV with an eye-roll and observe mildly: “Well, I think that’s quite enough America for us all for a while now.” And yet: there can and must always be more. It is simply the way of things. If you thought the World Cup being carried on to the pitch ahead of Sunday’s final in some kind of Louis Vuitton sex trunk was the nadir of hysterical trashiness in sport, then simply recall the lesson of the past few years and expand your mind. It can always get trashier.

To the parched fairways of Royal Birkdale, then, the host of this year’s Open Championship, which – yesssssss! – was won by someone other than Bryson DeChambeau or Scottie Scheffler or any of the other radioactively ghastly US golfers you’d cheerfully head-flush in a Mar-a-Lago loo just as long as you could clear the classified documents out of it first. It has now been revealed that, during his heated row over a two-shot penalty he was handed for improving the area for his backswing, DeChambeau has been accused of threatening to call the US president unless it was all resolved in his favour. To repeat: threatening to call Donald Trump.

If you missed this, DeChambeau picked up the penalty for improving the line of his swing, apparently having trodden down some long grass close to his ball on the fifth hole during the second round last Friday. He publicly lost his mind about it, demanded to be driven back to the scene with officials, then returned to the tournament scoring area and reportedly threatened to call Trump. Has a new portal to the dark side opened in sport? Given Trump’s known intervention in the World Cup (of which more shortly), who among us would bet against it?

At time of writing, I had read everything about this sensational escalation, but I still don’t know nearly enough about it. I need every detail. I need everyone involved to reconstruct the entire conversation. I want to know exactly how quickly you might go from “no way did I do any gardening” to “fuck you – patch in the president”. This is a new era of American pant-wetting and I need to understand absolutely everything about its conventions.

Certainly, all I already thought about Bryson DeChambeau has been magnified. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, as well as being a two-time US Open champion, Bryson is a hardcore Mar-a-Lago steak-gobbler who got a shout-out in Trump’s 2024 election victory address, though that was delivered at the Palm Beach Convention Center and not at the latter’s Floridian golf-club residence. (Even so, every time we see those words, the hilarity should strike us anew. The president of the United States of America lives in a golf club. Honestly: I just CAN’T.) Anyway, in the small hours after his victory over Kamala Harris, Trump was very keen to pluck DeChambeau from the sliders queue or the ormolu urinals or wherever and get him up on stage. “Bryson DeChambeau is up here somewhere,” Trump told the cameras. “What happened to Bryson? Where is he? Bryson! He’s hitting balls. He’s on the way?” Eventually, DeChambeau realised there was nothing for it but to climb awkwardly on to the stage.

And yet, where is your orange god now, Bryson? Where was he on Friday, as you seemingly failed to summon him to a faraway British links course having been observed doing a bit of landscaping?

There seems, at present, to be no evidence that Bryson put the call in, and since he flaked out of all media appearances for the tournament, no one has been able to ask if he contacted the president in any other way. We understand, however, that he asked for Trump to be called. Sad. Perhaps the only thing worse than demanding that the president be called over you dicking around with the grass is not having the president called over you dicking around with the grass. And then realising that, in many ways, you got less off Trump than some guy called Folarin Balogun who plays a sport called … hang on, let me get my lorgnette … “soccer”. That would be a lot of perspective for Bryson to absorb on a Friday lunchtime.

The maddest thing about the entire revelation is what it says about how comically debased and politicised sport has been in such short order. Because the thing is, you can totally see it. You can genuinely imagine that the only situation room Trump wouldn’t lose focus in after about 10 minutes is one where he was required to cheat remotely at golf. You can just picture him assembling Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio and all the other guys with the too-big shoes in the White House situation room, and them huddling round a feed like the photo of the Obama administration watching the Seal team raid that got Osama bin Laden. Only this one is coming from a grass-level camera at Royal Birkdale.

As indicated, we already know the US president cheats at sport for people. Precisely two weeks ago, this column covered the business of him making three phone calls to the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, about the red card and match suspension handed to US striker Balogun. On Sunday, the Uefa president, Aleksander Ceferin, went so far as to boycott the World Cup final over, among other things, Infantino allowing this. The only question, surely, is when the next incident or threat will occur. The floodgates of Whitehousery have been opened, and only the US has the power to shut them.