Captain America made his getaway on a golf cart straining to climb the steep incline from the 15th green. By then, Bryson DeChambeau’s bold confidence had dissipated, and he avoided looking back at the scattered remnants of Team USA sprawled across Bethpage Black.

DeChambeau, along with his teammate Justin Thomas, was expected to set the tone at the outset of this 45th Ryder Cup yesterday morning. They were the formidable Americans meant to challenge Tyrrell Hatton and Jon Rahm, invigorating the crowd and creating a momentum that would unsettle Luke Donald’s European team.

However, DeChambeau and Thomas established an entirely different mood. Although they arrived at the first tee cloaked in the American flag like superheroes, they lost their opening match of the day and conceded the first point.

By the close, DeChambeau had lost his afternoon fourballs match, too, going down 1up with his partner Ben Griffin to Tommy Fleetwood and Justin Rose. Played two and lost two, then, and stuck with label of the leader of a USA team that, at the end of a sobering first day, is staring down the barrel of a humiliation.

It all came back to that first match. Hatton and Rahm were not impressed by DeChambeau and Thomas and they were not intimated by them and they were certainly not outplayed by them.

The Europeans trounced DeChambeau and Thomas 4&3 in the morning foursomes and, behind them, the other dominoes fell. So much for Captain America’s rebel yell. It fell silent in the morning and in the afternoon.

There were isolated flashpoints throughout the day. A US fan yelled ‘Get some cardio,’ at Bob MacIntyre late in his foursomes defeat, with Viktor Hovland against Xander Schauffele and Patrick Cantlay. ‘You look like you’re still breastfeeding,’ someone shouted at Matt Fitzpatrick.

There was a roar, too, when DeChambeau and Thomas went 1up on the first and the crowd tried to jump on the Europeans when they made their way to the second tee. ‘Unnh-oh,’ an American voice shouted out theatrically when Rahm hit an errant shot. ‘Mediocre,’ someone else yelled. It was all relatively tame.

It got tamer still when Hatton and Rahm turned the match round by going from one down on the 6th to 1up on the eighth. DeChambeau and Thomas never looked like getting back on level terms.

Fanaticism needs fuel and after the first few holes, DeChambeau and Thomas could not provide any. It was so quiet by the third tee as the players approached that the song of a blue jay was the only sound that interrupted the beautiful early autumn day. Bethpage Black was supposed to be a bear-pit but it was more like a nature trail.

Sure, there were pockets of life. There were islands of abuse. When Hatton hooked his tee shot into a kind of scrubland near the Pouring Bar at the side of the fifth fairway, it came to rest near an outhouse. The US fans loved that. ‘It’s next to the s***ter,’ one yelled out helpfully to Rahm, to much hilarity.

And when DeChambeau birdied the 14th, he pumped his fist in the air and exhorted the crowd to get loud. But then Rahm sank a 10ft putt to tie the hole and keep Europe 3Up and the atmosphere fell flat again.

By then, the board was showing Europe so far ahead in two of the other morning matches that the USA tried to throw all their resources into cheering on DeChambeau and Thomas in one last desperate effort to claw back their three-hole deficit.

There is a vertiginous hill that plunges from the 14th green to the 15th tee and as Hatton and Rahm marched down it, it felt as if they were at last feeling the full force of American fervour that they had been promised would rain down on them.

The noise? The din? The abuse? The hostility? The truth is, it was barely there during the morning foursomes. The fans were so subdued it was tempting to think of them as the dissolute overspill from one of the louche parties imagined by F Scott Fitzgerald and thrown by the Great Gatsby here on Long Island in the 1920s.

Sure there was a military fly-past involving some F15 fighters and a KC-135 Stratotanker as the players stood on the first tee. That generated some decibels. And after DeChambeau crashed a drive over the trees towards the apron of the green, he turned and shook his fist towards the grandstand, which got a reaction.

There were more flashpoints in the afternoon. President Trump’s arrival for the start of the afternoon fourballs stoked up the crowd around the 1st tee, Rory McIlroy appeared to give a fan the middle finger after something was said on the 11th green and a US fan yelled ‘get some cardio’ at Bob MacIntyre late in his morning foursomes defeat.

But a bear-pit? Not really. Medinah in 2012 was a bear-pit, fans screaming and yelling as the European players hit their tee-shots, full-on bedlam day after day. This was raucous late in the afternoon, sure, but it was nothing the European players couldn’t handle.

Fanaticism needs fuel and in that first match, DeChambeau and Thomas could not provide any. It was so quiet by the third tee as the players approached that the song of a blue jay was the only sound that interrupted the beautiful early autumn day. Bethpage Black was supposed to be a bear-pit but it was more like a nature trail.

There were pockets of life. There were islands of abuse. When Hatton hooked his tee shot into a kind of scrubland near the Pouring Bar at the side of the fifth fairway, it came to rest near an outhouse. The US fans loved that. ‘It’s next to the s***ter,’ one yelled out helpfully to Rahm, to much hilarity.

And when DeChambeau birdied the 14th, he pumped his fist in the air and exhorted the crowd to get loud. But then Rahm sank a 10ft putt to tie the hole and keep Europe 3Up and the atmosphere fell flat again.

By then, the board was showing Europe so far ahead in two of the other morning matches that the USA tried to throw all their resources into cheering on DeChambeau and Thomas in one last desperate effort to claw back their three-hole deficit.

There is a vertiginous hill that plunges from the 14th green to the 15th tee and as Hatton and Rahm marched down it, it felt as if they were at last feeling the full force of American fervour that they had been promised would rain down on them.

Basketball legend Michael Jordan had appeared by then and rode a golf buggy down the hill, the McLaren chief executive Zak Brown was there and the USA captain Keegan Bradley had joined the support party.

By then, Bradley had a haunted look in his eyes. Bradley is not an inscrutable man. He is not good at hiding his emotions and he looked close to panic as he surveyed the digital scoreboards that were liberally splashed with blue. I walked down the slope next to him and a solitary bead of sweat was rolling down his cheek.

It all made Bradley’s Dances with Wolves homage the evening before, running down the 18th, holding the flag aloft, trying to inflame the crowd, look even more absurd than it had at the time.

At the bottom of the slope there was a narrow human corridor of fans and, at last, a wall of noise. A giant Stars and Stripes flag was strung between two oak trees so that formed a kind of canopy that the players walked beneath.

The crowd booed Hatton and Rahm lustily. They jeered and yelled and mocked. But Hatton and Rahm strode on through them, side by side, unruffled, united, determined and confident in their lead.

And just to emphasise that the Europeans were not unsettled, it was DeChambeau who sliced his drive wildly off the 15th tee so that it came to rest at the foot of a giant hospitality marquee. Hatton smoked his drive down the centre of the fairway.

When Thomas missed yet another short putt on the 15th, Europe was 4up with three to play. It was over. Thomas turned to DeChambeau and apologised.

The Europeans celebrated. Hatton mentioned to a television interviewer that the crowd conditions had been ‘tough’ and I asked him how tough. He smiled. ‘Until you are there and actually living it, you never really know,’ he said. ‘It was pretty cool, though.’

Behind him, DeChambeau was making his escape. Captain America climbed on to that buggy and drove away to search for his superpowers. Judging by his afternoon capitulation, he didn’t find them.