Long live the Ryder Cup, always a riveting contest

Next Friday to Sunday a huge number of people – by no means all middle-aged men and over – will be following the Ryder Cup on TV, iPads, phones etc. This biennial contest between the multi-millionaire golf professionals of the USA and their fellow rich men in the European team has become one of the world’s great sporting events. This is partly because it is well-hyped, but more so because it almost always provides a riveting contest and often a nail-bitingly close finish. It is also because match-play golf is much more involving for spectators and followers than the four rounds of tournament medal-play.

All the same, few would have predicted the success of the Ryder Cup even fifty years ago. Then of course, the match was between the USA and Great Britain & Ireland, and the Americans almost always won, usually by a comfortable margin. There were a couple of reasons for this. The Americans were all hardened tournament pros, but though the British and Irish players were also of course professionals, there wasn’t then a real, or at least a really demanding, tournament circuit this side of the Atlantic. British and Irish players were also club professionals and some would have derived most of their income from their club job and the management of the club shop.

It was indeed customary for newspaper reports of tournaments to append the player’s club in brackets – for example, Dai Rees (South Herts), Peter Alliss (Ferndown), John Panton (Glenbervie). Until 1959, the match then played over two days, rather than three as now, consisted of four 36-hole foursomes on the first day, followed by eight 36-hole singles on the second. Obviously the longer match tends to favour the better player. A run-of-the-mill tournament pro might hope to beat any of next week’s Ryder Cup players over a 9-hole match, his chances diminishing the longer the scheduled tie. So it’s not surprising that for half a century after the first Ryder Cup in 1927 the contest was rarely even close.

Actually for much of that time the amateur equivalent, the Walker Cup, got as much Press attention, just as the British Amateur championship was probably more widely reported than the professional match-play one.

This was partly because the papers which gave most attention to Golf, “The Times” and “The Daily Telegraph” in London, “The Scotsman” and “The Glasgow Herald” in Scotland and, I suppose, “The Irish Times” in Ireland, had a middle-class readership, while those who read the golf reports were mostly keen or fairly keen golfers themselves, while the papers’ Golf Correspondents  might be themselves modestly distinguished amateur golfers.

Moreover, few Golf pros in Britain and Ireland would then have earned more (except in an exceptionally successful year) than a good middle-class – upper middle-class salary. So there was little incentive for even leading amateurs to turn professional. Consequently, some featured in several Walker Cups, and a few like Joe Carr, always described in the Press (as “the Dublin draper”) were at least as well-known as the professionals. Now of course few play in more than one Walker Cup, turning professional immediately after it. Not surprisingly the general public, inasmuch as it follows golf, rarely knows anything about the players in the Walker Cup, and so it is much less significant than it was when I was a boy when I could have named a Walker Cup team more surely than the Ryder Cup one.

It’s generally reckoned that the event was given necessary new life when the Great Britain and Ireland team became the European one, and that nobody contributed more to making the Ryder Cup a genuine – and passionately-played – contest than the late Seve Ballasteros. This is surely true, even though there are and have been European players with a better Ryder Cup record than Ballasteros. Nevertheless it remains the case that British and Irish players usually outnumber other Europeans in the team- though this time numbers are equal, while in his four captain’s picks, Thomas Bjorn has picked two Englishmen, Ian Poulter and Paul Casey, a Spaniard, Sergio Garcia and a Swede, Henrik Stenson. There has been come criticism of these selections, partly because all four are just either side of the age of forty, partly because they haven’t all been in good form. But everyone knows that form fluctuates from week to week, and Poulter, Stenson and Garcia all have good Ryder Cup records.

In defence of Bjorn’s selection, one should say that five of the eight players who qualified automatically will be playing in their first Ryder Cup, and rookies sometimes find the experience overwhelming, as indeed a couple of young Englishmen did two years ago. That said, it seems strange that Bjorn didn’t pick the young Belgian Thomas Pieters who did exceptionally well on his debut in the USA two years ago, winning his Singles and, in partnership with Rory McIlroy, two Fourballs and one Foursomes match. They talk of players like Garcia, Stenson and Poulter being ‘Ryder Cup animals’. Pieters seemed to qualify as that in 2016. I reckon he is unlucky not to have been picked – and will be missed.

On paper the Americans look like favourites. But then they usually do. Even if you discount Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, whose victories in the four Majors are some way in the past, other members of the American team – Brooks Koepka, Patrick Reed, Jordan Spieth and Dustin Johnson, for instance have a better record of winning majors recently than the Europeans. Francesco Molinari of course won The Open in July but it’s some years now since Rory McIlroy won a major and indeed the European team can’t boast more than eight or nine Major titles between them.

In a curious way, this may not matter. Though Golf is such an individual sport, one in which a player’s first opponent in match-play is the course itself, somehow or other the Ryder Cup does seem to generate a remarkable team spirit, and, over the years this has been more evident in the European than the American side. The worrying thing is that this time it may be different. The younger American players are said to get on well together and are expected to bond easily. Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson have never been bosom chums, and Bubba Watson is not everyone’s bottle of Cola, but it’s just possible that the USA team will be a closer-knit unit than the European one…

For the first time the match is being held in France. It’s a pit that no Frenchman has forced his way into the team. Golf has never quite managed to become a popular sport in France – even though a Frenchman, Arnaud Massy, won The Open at Hoylake in 1907 in what were described as appalling conditions – heavy rain and strong to gale-force winds. No Frenchman has won it since, though Massy himself was defeated only in a play-off against Harry Vardon four years later, and of course, Jean van der Velde rather threw his chance away at Carnoustie almost twenty years ago, by going paddling instead of taking a drop and a penalty stroke. Still, I guess the shade of Arnaud Massy may be hovering over this Ryder Cup, hoping the event will give a stimulus in France to the game he himself learned at Biarritz and North Berwick way back in the 1890s.