Eyes down for the longest week in golf. If you are a fan of the Ryder Cup, the best thing you could do for yourself right now is head away off and book a few days with the Carthusian monks in the Chartreuse mountains high in the French Alps. Sunday to Thursday should do it. Maybe look for a late checkout on Friday, just to be sure.
The Carthusian lads are big into solitude – they only venture beyond the monastery walls twice a year and otherwise deny themselves contact with the outside world. In the early part of Ryder Cup week, that would qualify as a premium service.
Between now and next Friday, you won’t be able to move for the level of extraneous guff being talked about the Ryder Cup. If it was just stuff about the pairings and the captains and the relative strengths of the two teams, that would be one thing. Deadly boring maybe, but at least it would be tolerable.
That’s not how it will be though. You just know that the days will be filled with a world of jabber about Trump and wives and culture wars and a million other things as well. I’d bet good money that somewhere in America this weekend, Luke Donald is preparing an answer on Jimmy Kimmel, just in case. Everything in Ryder Cup week is a bomb of silliness waiting for someone to trip over the detonator.
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The big talking point this time around, of course, is the fans. Over the coming days, you will be guaranteed to hear no end of sermonising about the New York Sports Fan, an apparently feral creature who can’t be trusted to attend a sports event of any kind without dribbling on himself, soiling his britches and shouting the sort of abuse that would be asterisked out of Viz magazine.
And so you have former US captain Lanny Wadkins calling Europeans a “bunch of wusses” who can’t handle the heat. There have been stories about Team Europe training with Virtual Reality headsets, filled with noise and vitriol and bespoke insults for each player. It can’t be long before the dreary sermonising begins, with journalists and columnists who get through the gates for nothing telling people who have spent $750 a ticket how they should comport themselves. Spare us.
[ It costs just €63 to play at Bethpage but Ryder Cup prices go a different wayOpens in new window ]
The underlying theme of it all is the existential conflict between golf and the Ryder Cup. Golf is mannerly, classy and proper. The Ryder Cup is rowdy, belligerent and sloppy as all hell. Golf is a high-minded night at The Irish Times Debates. The Ryder Cup is a fight in a parking lot with Shane Lowry bundling Rory McIlroy into a car. Golf insists you mind your Ps and Qs. The Ryder Cup is brought to you by the letters F, S and C.
All of which is why people who wouldn’t watch 30 seconds of the FedEx Cup if you welded them to the armrests of the livingroom chair will devote 72 hours next weekend to watching the action from Bethpage. Golf can turn its nose up all it likes at the dreadful oiks attracted to the Ryder Cup but it is what it is because that’s what it has always been.
You think conflict at the Ryder Cup is a modern phenomenon? Not a bit of it. Adare Manor next time out will be the 100th anniversary of the first Ryder Cup and throughout that whole century, it has never lacked for rows and bad cess.
As early as the second Ryder Cup in 1929 at Mooretown in Leeds, there was a lovely bit of niggle between US captain Walter Hagan and his opposite number George Duncan. When asked early in the week how he thought he would fare, Hagan – who at the time was by far the biggest name in golf – replied: “I shall win. I always do.”
Duncan, a reliably cranky Scot who had won the British Open in 1920, was having none of it. “Our golf is not so mechanical as that of the Americans,” he said. “A machine has its limitations; it does not respond so readily as the mental and physical make-up of the human being to what I have called ‘urge’, and that is one of the reasons I confidently contemplate success.”
So much so that when it came to the singles, Duncan let it be known that he would be putting himself out in the fourth match, basically goading Hagen to do the same so they could have a head-to-head. Hagen took the bait and was roundly hammered, with Duncan pulling off a 10&8 victory. “I told him I would be at number four,” said Duncan at the post-match banquet after his team’s 7-5 victory. “And sure enough he came along. He sacrificed one match.”
That’s what the Ryder Cup is and what it has always been. It has shit-talking and razzing baked into its DNA. It’s a break from the usual grinding fustiness of golf, a departure from the norms of a sport that is always treating you like you’ve tramped into its livingroom wearing your work boots. For 727 days every two years, golf talks down to you. For these three days alone, anything goes.
Donald is smart enough to know that railing against it will get his team nowhere. Don’t be surprised if Europe decide to lean into the chaos, cupping their ears to all the abuse and shushing the yahoos as they go. Anyone beseeching people to behave themselves over the coming week doesn’t get it – take the rancour out and it’s just a bunch of rich guys whacking a ball around a field.
That might be golf but it ain’t the Ryder Cup.
