Bike Ryder Policing sounds fun. But it’s serious business

Farmingdale, NY – This 45 Cup Ryder At Bethpage Black, deep in a 1,400 -hectare state park, would always be a spectacle. And then the President of the United States appeared, To see the action of the first day. For hundreds of police officers working the incident – standing, in golf carts, by bicycle – it was like a guard’s change. Their bosses were still their bosses, but now the secret service was leading the show.

Around 11am, Kory Barney, one by one by an officers covering the event by bicycle, looked up from the Black Trek Mountain of 21 -speed Shalhai’s saddle and saw Air Force flying during the course. During a 20-year-old career as a New York State Park officer, he thought he had seen them all. On Friday, he discovered that he did not.

“In this job, your adrenaline is always pumping,” LT was saying. Barney Friday afternoon, shortly after Donald Trump left the building. “But with Potus here, it was even more.”

It was 3pm Barney’s day had begun 12 hours ago, in a hotel room, wearing work in the middle of the night. He wore his black bike pants with their cargo pockets, his five -pound five -pound -pound vest, his Black Park/Bethi Golf’s shirt. Then, finally, his black strap of the tools (in a way of speaking), a glock that hangs from him, over his right pocket. Long before the sun rises, he was at the tourist command center of the tournament, taking a special conversation from his captain with much higher actions than anything that 24 Ryder Cup players will hear from them: “Take care of yourself, take care of people there.”

In the course, the tone was easier.

Can I buy your shirt?

Can I make a trip?

You want beer?

New York

Barney is from Way upstate New York and as a kid who received some local golf lessons, Derek Sprague, who today is the CEO of America. Barney, a father and a man, is a man of 200 pounds who can run a mile in 6 minutes, ski any double black diamond path, rocky Mountain bike trails all day and break 90 on Sunday, but not this Sunday. He will work.

Barney will tell you that a bike is an impossible but spectacular way to travel a golf course and visit its perimeter. He is there to not see the golf, but to see the people looking at the golf. He wears impermeable sunglasses. You may not know what you are watching.

“You are constantly scanning the crowd,” Barney was saying Friday afternoon. “You are looking for something that is not ordinary, looking for a person acting in a strange way, or being somewhere that are not thought to be.”

He observed a man kneeling on a Macadami path and claiming, surprisingly, that the long cuffs of plants were a kind of wig.

“Does this guy give you anything to worry?” Barney was asked.

“Nah,” Barney said. “He’s just having fun.”

An unattended clip that can be disturbing. Three extra large boys big, without a hat and sunburn and obstacles that can be disturbing. A guy who turns a plant into a wig, this is nothing.

Five days in this long seven-day work week, the biggest issue Barney had seen was excess patrons and there was not much of this. It is expensive, being bombed at $ 18 beer. No one wants to be thrown out after paying $ 750 (minimum) for a one-day ticket, for the first ryder cup in Ryder in Bethpage Black.

Barney and the other 11 bike officers ride in harsh, among fans and never on the right roads, among players. Barney’s travel wheels were sometimes rolled through Slop on Friday, starting the mud in his calves, which years skiing, jogging and bike have become the limbs of trees. During the week, he will put hundreds of miles on his bike. He often, by choice, goes 16 hours without eating. He will sleep and eat and capture his life as Sunday returns to Monday and this Ryder cup finds its place in books. Until then, he has two advantages, the second more important than the first:

*Put a good mojo on the local team;

*Serve and protected; serve and protect; serve and protect.

Prohibition is a professional risk. When he stops, he becomes a stand of human information. People want to know where they can trade, how to reach the spectator ships, what hole Bryson dechambeau is in and similar. Kory Barney answers any questions he can, as much as possible, looking at the middle distance all the time, scanning to the left and to his right, as a tennis fan watching a rally. He says, “Let’s keep moving here.”

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments in Michael.bamberger@golf.com.