‘It’s a Changed Atmosphere Now’: Pro Golfer Paul McGinley Claims His Team Once Drank an Absurd 72 Bottles of Wine in a Single Night While Winning Ryder Cup

Paul McGinley watches his tee shot on 11 during Rd1 of the Insperity Invitational at The Woodlands Country Club Tournament Course on April 28 in The Woodlands, Texas. (Photo by Ken Murray/Icon Sportswire) (Icon Sportswire via AP Images)

In an interview with the Golf Channel, former professional golfer and Ryder Cup champion Paul McGinley discussed how the sport has evolved — specifically, in regards to its competitors’ drinking habits.

McGinley won the Ryder Cup in 2004, and he said that before the last day in Michigan (which they dominated), his team consumed a collective six-dozen bottles of wine.

“I remember one of the backroom staff telling us on a Saturday night, we had consumed 72 bottles of wine already on Saturday night—and they had to go and reorder. And this is when matches were still on,” McGinley told the Golf Channel, per The Drinks Business. “It’s not like we were getting drunk every night, far from it. But everyone would have had one, two, maybe three glasses of wine at night and it was normal. And you know, nine, 10 out of the 12 players would do that. Obviously it’s a changed atmosphere now.”

Let’s fact-check that statement, since it’s pretty absurd. A standard bottle contains about five glasses worth of wine. So, let’s say 10 players (since McGinley said nine or 10) had three (since he said two or three) glasses of wine that night. That would be 30 glasses of wine, equivalent to six bottles. That leaves a whopping 66 bottles, or 330 glasses, unaccounted for.

If 10 players consumed 72 bottles of wine and split them evenly, they would each have had to drink 36 glasses that night. If we ignore his “nine, 10” comment and expand that to assume all 12 players were drinking, that still equals 30 glasses per person. This would have led to a lot of stomach pumping and probably deaths.

Our best guess here, assuming the 72 number is accurate, is that these players were drinking with a very large party of people beyond the team. That’s the only real explanation.

Anyhow, things have apparently changed since the days when players could get drunk off wine during a competition. McGinley became a captain a decade later, in 2014, and found that the drinking culture had changed.

“Nobody drank. I mean, nobody,” McGinley said, per The Drinks Business. “I wasn’t like, ‘It’s a Ryder Cup I’m not going to drink.’ It was a case of, ‘No, I’m not drinking, I don’t drink when I play. It’s not even a question,” he said.

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