Date: September 25, 2014
Author: Mike Clayton / www.golf.org.au

Ryder Cup all about the money

decades the Ryder Cup matches were exhibitions of great American golfing skills. The British teams took them more seriously and the rare win (1957) or tie (1969) were reasons for great celebration. Winning for the British was all but out of the question in the 1970s and no one knew it better than Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Tom Weiskopf and their compatriots.

It was Nicklaus who suggested the conscription of continental players into the British team and although controversial at the time it revitalized what has since become the greatest event in golf.

In 1985 the Europeans finally won for the first time since 1957 at The Belfry, a forgettable course looking more like one you might find in America than the English Midlands.

With a team lead by the great Severiano Ballesteros and with a real chance to win critics wondered why the home team would choose a course so apparently favourable to the Americans.

The Europeans simply played better and more impressively they went to Nicklaus’ Muirfield Village two years later and won again.

The course makes not a scrap of difference to the result and since 1985 the Europeans have not chosen a course, links or heathland to advantage them.

It is all about the money and it is surely no coincidence recent European venues, Valderrama, The K Club and Celtic Manor were owned by billionaires who bought the event to their parkland, American designed, courses.

This week at Gleneagles we will see a course designed by Nicklaus and one indistinguishable in look or arrangement to what we see week to week on the PGA Tour in America. The only hint the event is being contested in Scotland, aside from the mandatory leaden skies of the Scottish autumn, are the beautiful Perthshire hills in the distance.

The Europeans are favoured to win but in eighteen-hole matchplay unpredictable results are a certainty. The Europeans have the four best players in the world and if Rory McIlroy, Sergio Garcia, Justin Rose and Martin Kaymer play their best golf it will be incredibly difficult to beat the home side.

The evening out of the competition began when the European Tour switched to the American sized ball in the late 1970s. It required better striking and within a few years Ballesteros, Nick Faldo, Bernhard Langer, Ian Woosnam, Jose-Maria Olazabal and Sandy Lyle emerged as world-class players and they formed the spine of more than competitive European teams.

The generation to follow, Justin Rose, Lee Westwood, Ian Poulter, Graeme McDowell, Sergio Garcia and now McIlroy, went further, moving to America and playing the PGA Tour full-time. Of this European team only Stephen Gallacher, Thomas Bjorn, Jamie Donaldson and the mysterious Frenchman Victor Dubuisson play anything more than a token gesture of regular European Tour events.

That the course is designed by an American and mowed to look like it’s in America will not bother this largely American domiciled European team.

The American’s are without the injured Tiger Woods, the ‘resting’ Dustin Johnson and their hottest player, Billy Horschel who won only fourteen million dollars in last month’s playoffs.

It would be a much better team with the three playing for Tom Watson but his twelve are hardly hackers and their captain will have them more than determined to avenge the extraordinary loss two years ago at Medinah where they managed to squander a lead of 10 to 4 with a few holes left to play on Saturday night. It was Poulter who led the comeback with some out-of –this-world play and anything close to the drama in Chicago will only highlight what an amazing event Samuel Ryder began in 1926.