Motivated to beat Bubba?
IJUST finished watching Europe defeat USA for the sixth consecutive time on European soil to win the Ryder Cup, perhaps the most important team sport outside of football’s World Cup.
France won the World Cup. USA failed to qualify for the tournament. Then, in Paris, Europe turned back USA’s challenge in the Ryder Cup. NBC’s Jimmy Roberts asked Ian (‘Mr Ryder Cup’) Poulter what was the basis of the deep feelings carried by every European with regards to this particular tournament. Why were he and the fans so emotional whenever Europe won? ‘Poults’ diplomatically circled the query or, probably more accurately, refused to answer.
Americans just don’t get it. Outside of their fiercely jingoistic “sea to shining sea” borders, they’re feared and disliked with equal intensity. Poults could’ve delivered a one-word answer, ‘history’, but that wouldn’t tell the entire story. Perhaps ‘US disdain for history’ would be more accurate. Readers need only recall some historical facts that might well fuel the bitter rivalry that attends the Ryder Cup.
Europe, as a developed entity, existed centuries before the USA.
Insofar as England (Ian Poulter’s homeland) in particular is concerned, the USA got its chance to enter the world stage as a British colony.
For a very long time (300 years or so), the USA was a small part of the British empire.
So, to see the monumental arrogance with which a developed USA, with national ego more out of proportion with its body of accomplishments than Donald Trump’s head, strutting the world stage demeaning other nations politically when Europe’s (and especially Britain’s) perspective is that, without the ‘old world’, USA wouldn’t exist, is especially galling to Britons.
The contagion has spread throughout Europe, as many recent US presidents make more disparaging remarks about the French and Spanish (who consider themselves the ‘discoverers’ of America); have ‘intervened’ in the internal affairs of countries like Bosnia; and generally behaved as if Americans are inherently superior when, by any impartial analysis, as can be seen daily in ongoing soap operas featuring Stormy Daniels, Brett Kavanaugh and egregious cruelty imposed, in the name of law and order, at USA’s borders, it’s clear to non-Americans at kindergarten that they’re just big bullies.
ARROGANT TEMERITY
Their general attitude to sports doesn’t help. They have the arrogant temerity to call an intranational baseball tournament The World Series when a majority of nations don’t even want to play the sport. They can’t play football to any consistent international standard, so they invent their own ‘football’ (really just bastardised rugby) named after the shape of the ball and not related to how the game is played. And they think their golfers are entitled to be world champions because they’re American.
Well, Englishman Justin Rose, a golfer of decent talent but the poster boy for Edison’s “genius is one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration”, is the second British winner of America’s Fedex Cup in the last three years. Italian Francesco Molinari became 2018’s champion golfer of the year by winning The Open and recorded a magnificent 5-0-0 in the Ryder Cup. Europeans won three of the four 2014 majors, and non-Americans won nine of the last 18 majors.
But, likely the most significant indicator of the differing motivations at the Ryder Cup (European determination vis-a-vis American laissez-faire attitude of entitlement) was highlighted last weekend when Tiger Woods, probably the best golfer of all time, just went 0 for 4 in this Ryder Cup (a week after his emotional win in the US PGA’s Tour Championship) and has an overall Ryder Cup record of 13-27-3 (9-19-1 in the ‘team’ games).
The phenomenon is akin to something the current generation of West Indian sports fans might never understand about the euphoric worship given to our cricket teams of the 1960s through 1980s, especially when ‘we’ beat England in England. It’s revenge for historical wrongs. Elementary, my dear Bubba.
Peace and love.