They have created a monster that is only getting bigger
All the drama plus the rivalries make this event compelling viewing, writes Oliver Brown
Where the Masters likes to preserve its mystery, the Ryder Cup strives, unashamedly, for the monumental. Where Augusta upholds a conviction that less is more, restricting TV broadcasts of its front nine and regarding inside-the-ropes access as terribly infra dig, Le Golf National will today showcase golf at its most gargantuan, with enough spectators encircling the first tee to fill the average League Two football ground.
It was 27 years ago, during the “War on the Shore” at Kiawah Island, that Hale Irwin evoked the event’s suffocating pressure thus: “All I could hear was the crowd chanting, ‘USA, USA’. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t swallow.” Come the 2014 edition at Gleneagles, some of the Americans could not even manage the few strides from the clubhouse. One of Sky’s creative gurus had commandeered a drab, grey tunnel beneath a fairway and plastered the walls with images of Europe’s Ryder Cup glories of old. Thomas Bjorn, now the captain, would touch a picture of Seve Ballesteros for luck. Some of his adversaries, taking fright at such superstition, would take the long walk round instead.
Today, the Ryder Cup has cemented itself as that rarest of beasts, an event whose glossy corporate sheen detracts not one iota from the purity of the sporting contest. While the opening ceremony might have seemed grandiose in its schmaltzy efforts at symbolism – watching Justin Rose and Tommy Fleetwood stand last night for Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, the European Union’s unofficial anthem, was a particular oddity in these tense pre-brexit times – such excesses are forgotten as soon as the opening tee-shot is struck.
Much of the magic, of course, springs from the team dimension, which enlivens golf ’s starchy image with the type of trash-talk that players would not think of indulging elsewhere. “Nick Faldo,” the ever-charming Scott Hoch once said, “is as much fun as Saddam Hussein.” By Hazeltine in 2016, this had morphed into the sight of Johnny Miller deriding Darren Clarke’s team as “possibly the worst European side ever”. Is this just a trick of the light? After
‘We sense that we don’t get respect from the US and that our Tour is seen as a country cousin’
all, the Ryder Cup is juxtaposed in the calendar with the PGA Tour finale, where the Fedex Cup bounty has made Rose £8.8million richer.
Can a golfer switch from such materialistic motivation to a selfless team ethic the moment he boards a flight from Atlanta to Paris? Yes, if you believe a succession of captains who have recruited larger backroom teams than NASA to find the perfect recipe for esprit de corps. The fashion these days is to enlist not just one vice-captain but five, with Des Smyth’s sole duty in 2014 to massage the bruised egos of those left on the sidelines for fourballs and foursomes.
The Super Bowl of golf, Americans have taken to calling it, although this was not always so. Padraig Harrington reflects that the watershed in the modern Ryder Cup’s evolution was marked by the bear pit of Brookline in 1999. Never mind Sam Torrance’s anger at the US players for charging the 17th green after a decisive putt by Justin Leonard – “the most disgusting thing I have ever seen in my life,” he said, with absurd melodrama – the scene was proof, in Harrington’s eyes, of how much it meant across the Atlantic.
“In a perfect world, you would not want them to run all over [Jose Maria] Olazabal’s line, but look at it like this: we drove them to that,” the Irishman says. “We created it. The reason we do well in the Ryder Cup is that we have a chip on our shoulder. We sense that we don’t get respect from the US and that the European Tour is regarded as some country cousin. Before ’99, some Americans were demanding that they should be paid to appear. But suddenly you thought, ‘These guys care. They want to win now.’”
The Ryder Cup’s ability to galvanise interest far beyond the traditional golf constituencies only grows. Part of the secret, explains Sky Sports managing director Barney Francis, is to create an immersive experience, conveying every facet of a fast-changing drama. “We’re in a culture of binge-viewing,” he says. “Both golf associations want you to see every shot, because every one counts. TV is always thought of as pictures, but at the Ryder Cup it is often about sounds, the roars when the players first come out. Sometimes, capturing the silence is as important as capturing the cacophony.”
Sky last night completed a renegotiation of its European Tour rights, securing the next two Ryder Cups in Wisconsin and Rome. The outcome was hardly in doubt, given that Francis, Britain’s most powerful sports broadcasting executive, believes that the deal is worth every penny.
“In nine years in this job, I’ve seen a lot of remarkable things, but Medinah 2012 is probably the best ever,” he says. “I was sitting on the bank behind the 17th as Justin Rose sank his putt, straight after watching Phil Mickelson flop the ball majestically on to the green. Then, as Martin Kaymer holed out at the last, the ghostly voice of [former Tour CEO] George O’grady came up behind me, saying, ‘I knew we sold those rights to you too cheaply.”
Already, Le Golf National feels like the Ryder Cup’s most extravagant incarnation yet. Organisers have taken the lairy pandemonium of the “Stadium Hole” in Phoenix, where thousands of fans toss beer cups into the air in unison, and transplanted it to the leafy suburbs of south-west Paris. Grandstands are gigantic, while even the corporate hospitality suites rise three storeys high. If the sense of occasion appears headier than ever, then this derives largely from the presence of a certain Tiger Woods.
A few miles from Versailles, in what was once the lair of Louis XIV, Woods’s six-year exile as a US player, coupled with his astonishing comeback victory in Atlanta last weekend, has assured him of a reception befitting the Sun King. Such was the fervour that accompanied his practice round yesterday, Justin Thomas, the world No 2, might as well have been the bagman.
Not that Thomas would claim to resent his relative anonymity, of course. “It’s bizarre just to be here with him,” he says. “He’s the reason why I love golf so much. When I was by myself on the putting green at seven, eight years old, in my head I would be making the putt to beat him.”
Francis speaks for many in the industry that has grown up around the Ryder Cup when he expresses relief that Woods is here. “I sat there and watched Jim Furyk’s wild card picks and I just thought, ‘Thank goodness’.” With the game’s pre-eminent player restored to the fold, this spectacle is again a licence to print money, its revenue for the week expected to nudge £100 million. For all its tendency towards the lurid, the lashings of tension and theatre, not to mention rivalries that shade into enmities, have melded to create an intoxicating cocktail. Originally a sporting curiosity, the Ryder Cup has burgeoned into a behemoth that all but transcends golf itself.