[PHOTO: Michael Miller/ISI Photos]
Though drinking on the golf course is a unique global tradition, drinking off of it remains the specialty of Europeans. Anyone with a few friends from Europe will know what I mean. Try to keep up with them on a night out, and you’re in for long morning. But don’t take our word for it. Just listen to Tyrrell Hatton, who told the story of the ‘messy night’ he spent partying with Jon Rahm after learning he had automatically qualified for the 2025 European Ryder Cup team.
“That was a very nice phone call to receive… I was over the moon, to be honest. So Jon had just won [the LIV Golf] individual [title], so we had a bit of a tear-up. Yeah, that was a messy night,” Hatton told reporters overnight at the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth.
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Asked if that celebration was a sign of things to come at Bethpage Black, Hatton admitted he hoped it wasn’t.
“I do not want to feel that bad the next day. Yeah, that was aggressive… If you want to know, I’ll tell you. When I actually get back into the room, I fell across the bed sideways, and face down in that position, and then I had woken myself up throwing up in that position. And I had then fallen back asleep in that position, and then as I’d woken up, I had gotten sick all down my arms, both sides, all down my shirt.
“I get off the bed and walk around to the bathroom, look in the mirror, and I’m sick in my face, in my bed. How I set an alarm to make a flight in a few hours’ time, I don’t know.
“But yeah, then waking up in a slightly more sober state was horrendous, and having to clean up that – I mean, I ended up calling [Hatton’s wife] Emily, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ I was rushing to make the room somewhat acceptable before leaving.
“So yeah, I ended up stripping in the bed, leaving some cash and a note, saying I was ‘really sorry, I was sick in the bed in the night, please throw it in the trash’.” I feel like I did the right thing but obviously in a pretty bad state… I don’t ever want to get to that state again, to be honest.”
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Yikes. We’ve all overdone it, but it’s extremely rare to hear a professional athlete go into such detail about it. To Hatton’s credit, though, he didn’t glorify his behaviour. This reads more like a confession than a brag, and that’s important because if a few things had gone differently – if Hatton had fallen asleep on his back instead of his stomach, for instance – it could have been resulted in something much worse than a hangover.
Thankfully that wasn’t the case and Hatton seems to have learned his lesson, but who knows what Bethpage will bring. A foreign-soil upset later this month would certainly be cause for another blurry night, but here’s hoping Hatton sticks to the seltzers this time around.
