Danny Willett's brother defends his incendiary Ryder Cup article

Published Nov. 15, 2016 1:53 p.m. ET

Nick Schwartz

Masters champion Danny Willett's brother Pete became a fan favorite for his comical tweets during championship Sunday at Augusta, but a satirical article published just before the start of the Ryder Cup - in which Willett roasted American golf fans - was poorly received and made Danny Willett the target of some extra jeers from the crowd at Hazeltine. The furor over the article partially overshadowed what should have been one of Willett's greatest accomplishments, and he had a miserable weekend in Minnesota - losing all three of his matches and finishing the event as one of four scoreless European golfers.

"They need to silence the pudgy, basement-dwelling, irritants, stuffed on cookie dough and pissy beer," Pete Willett wrote of Americans, "pausing between mouthfuls of hotdog so they can scream 'Baba booey' until their jelly faces turn red. They need to stun the angry, unwashed, Make America Great Again swarm, desperately gripping their concealed-carry compensators."

Danny Willett said afterward that the disappointing behavior of a select few American supporters proved his brother was right, and in an article for the Telegraph, Pete Willett admitted the timing of his piece was "atrocious," but argued that what he wrote was clearly satire that was misrepresented by the media.

Willett said that the immediate reaction to his article was positive, but things quickly changed once it spread in America.

Via the Telegraph:

“Then the press stepped in. First the Americans, followed by the British. The Twitter eggs descended. I received threats of violence, mocking memes, and insults to my children – I don’t know why they were targeted; they have very little influence over editorial content (this is a joke: my children have no influence over editorial content).”

.... The American press were particularly sensationalist in their reporting of the story. In a nation that seems gripped by post-truth Trump mania, perhaps I should not have been surprised. But I was shocked at the tone taken by the British press. And to make matters worse, I was bitterly disappointed that Team Europe then accepted this dishonest narrative."