WATCHING The Ryder Cup — The First 75 Years (a pre-tournament briefing session and appetite-sharpener from Sky Sports this week) and pondering anew those several moments down the years when the competition has appeared to be on the verge of precipitating actual armed warfare, one could only marvel at the irony of the doctor’s recommendation that brought Sam Ryder to golf in the first place. He would, the doctor said, benefit from what the game might offer him in the way of “light exercise”. Yeah, right. Run that one past the survivors of the “War on the Shore”.
These days, the pneumatic fist-pumping and cathartic gurning that accompany the sinking of any Ryder Cup putt, from any distance, at any point in the match, qualify by themselves as a total upper-body workout, with significant cardiovascular and lymphatic implications.
Even after a long weekend of this, the decisive shot- maker will still retain the energy to clean and jerk a human bundle containing at least two team-mates and his own wife and, continuing to hold them, bounce, to heights upwards of three feet, all over his defeated opponent’s line.
Say what you like, it’s not a game for the gently conditioned any more and when people wonder aloud whether, for example, Lee Westwood really has it in him to perform at this level, it’s generally these kinds of Ryder-specific demands that they are thinking of.
Some will argue that a return to more decorous physical standards — a retreat to the golden age of light exercise — wouldn’t hurt the Ryder Cup. And they’re probably right, as long as you don’t mind seeing the contest gutted of the fabulously turbulent competitiveness that it provides a home for and stripped of the opportunities to vent thinly concealed grievances that account for a significant part of the point of watching it in the first place.
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In any case, did light exercise even have a golden age? The Ryder Cup was rife with iffy behaviour even before it was the Ryder Cup. Take the story, told in this week’s programme, about Walter Hagen, during one of the formative transatlantic internationals, shovelling a tee-shot into some unhelpfully tall grass and then conducting an extensive search for his ball, with the enthralled gallery in tow acting as a broad-based roller, after which “the long grass wasn’t really a problem any more”.
Basically, it has been a long and glorious ride downhill all the way from there and those who believe that dark acts of cunning don’t have an especially gripping part to play in the narrative will have to work their way around the stories of Arnold Palmer attempting to stitch up Jack Nicklaus. “There was always this little thing between Jack and Arnold,” we were reminded. And they were on the same team.
Revisionists will also need to skirt the words of Dave Stockton, who continues to hold the distinction of being the only US Ryder Cup captain to send out a team in camouflage fatigues and who, in this week’s programme, crisply dismissed as “a bunch of bunk” the notion that something alien to the fundamental spirit of the Ryder Cup took place on his watch, in the year of the “War on the Shore”.
“I was very proud of what happened down there,” he said. “They (the players) cared, and they’ve cared ever since.”
Indeed. Ryder Cup teams care so much they become oblivious to the world around them, including, most obviously, what they are wearing. To look back across the competition is to see a history of changing fashions — but an entirely alternative and parallel one, touching at no point on the history of fashion as it happened anywhere else in the world.
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The received opinion is that, when the Great Britain and Ireland team expanded to become a Europe side, it was to balance the contest after years of American domination. However, some theorists now claim that there was another agenda, arguing that the expansion was a last-ditch attempt to encourage the belated involvement of some Italian tailors.
It didn’t happen. The costumes for both teams continued to be put together by an advisory panel apparently made up exclusively of German children’s entertainers. On the weekend of his Ryder Cup debut, a young Nick Faldo was obliged to wear, in rapid succession, a pair of grey checked slacks, of a kind popular with teddy bears; an orange shirt beneath a sky blue pullover, of a kind popular with Ronnie Corbett; and a bright green shirt beneath a pale blue pullover, of a kind popular with Ronnie Corbett’s teddy bear. Count the fashion faux pas in that little lot and win £25 of vouchers to spend at the pro shop of your choice.
What is remarkable is that Faldo survived and went on to be the golfer that he did. Thousands of other, more self-conscious youngsters would have collapsed under the sheer weight of all that viscose.
This time, of course, it will all be different. The teams will appear in something extremely cool and understated by Armani. Absolutely no one will be bearing a grudge or be prey to difficult, nationalistic impulses of any kind. And, as the first players step up to the tee on the first morning, a pig will be seen, performing a low pass over the clubhouse.
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GILES SMITH RETURNS ON SATURDAY