GIVE us an E! Give us a U! No, that doesn’t feel quite right, does it? All right then: one European Union! There’s only one European Union! That’s not right either. Come on Europe! We’re by far the greatest golfing team — the world will ever see! It still doesn’t get the pulse racing, does it? Try again: we’ll keep the blue flag with little gold stars flying here! I don’t know about you, but it’s not really doing the business for me. I’d better have a re-think. Because this is the Ryder Cup and it quite unquestionably excites great passions. On Friday, when it all begins, the blue jays will be shocked into silence at the Oakland Hills Country Club by the intensity of the emotions here.
We will watch grown men, big stars, millionaires to a man, cracking up before our eyes: we will see little guys, people most of us haven’t even heard of, performing heroics far beyond their normal capacity. People who care nothing for golf will watch this event enthralled: impassioned. But it won’t be for the sake of their love for Europe.
Certainly, it will be nice for us Europeans if Europe wins. But it will be an unadulterated delight for us citizens of the world if the United States loses. That’s not terribly nice, is it? But that is what the Ryder Cup has become: an alliance of all-sorts from everywhere we can get ‘em, gathered together for the sole purpose of taking the boss nation down a peg or two. There’s an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman, for starters, also a Frenchman and a couple of Spaniards, captained by a German with a Swede and a Dane as his vice-captains.
How do you unify that lot? Simple: give them a common enemy. Let ‘em gang up on the bully, let ‘em feel they are permanent underdogs going out to set the world to rights and settle a score or two while they are doing so.
But don’t tell any one, of course. Pretend it’s all straightforward good old sport between one good old nation and one good old continent. So there was the European captain, Bernhard Langer, telling us about the wholesomeness of competition between friends and how they will all let the clubs do the talking. We will find out what the good old blue-collar folk of Detroit think about that when they have sunk a few Buds and got stuck into the competition proper. “I have prepared them for the worst, and I hope they won’t experience it,” Langer said yesterday.
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There was a suggestion made at the captain’s press conference — it came from an American — that the Ryder Cup meant more to the Europeans than to the Americans. Langer, doing the diplomatic stuff, naturally knocked the question back with a well-structured platitude; “We’re friends,” he said. The fact is that winning the Ryder Cup certainly means more to the Europeans than it does to the Americans because they — still — don’t expect to.
But it is also the unquestionable fact that losing the Ryder Cup matters more to the Americans because they — still — don’t expect to. And it is that particular point of balance that makes this competition so intriguing. For the Europeans it has all the joys of cocking a snook, Jack the giant-killer, Agincourt, the boy with his finger in the dyke, the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo.
That seems to explain why Europe of recent years has been stronger over the first two days, when the players go out in pairs: there has to be a far deeper understanding of the team thing, the belonging thing, when you have a mighty enemy to confound. It is a deeply primitive response. One man could never beat a mammoth: it was teamwork that enabled the humans to become top mammal.
But of course, this was more stuff that Langer couldn’t mention. We all know it is true, Langer knows it is true, the Americans know it is true, the European team know it is true: but it would never do to say such a thing. “The way I see it, it’s your arrogance against our chippiness.” No, Langer didn’t say that: but then he didn’t need to. The entire modern history of the Ryder Cup is based on precisely that principle.
Of course, it is not as desperate as it once was. The American golfing establishment has a less protectionist attitude to its own competitions, American golfers travel more widely and and more frequently, golf is far more a meeting of equals than it was even a decade back, Langer himself is an American resident 20 years married to an American wife.
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But these things have not destroyed the essential truth of the Ryder Cup: that it is not about who wins, it is about whether or not America loses. Not nice, no, not healthy. Just compelling. I am reminded of a man I once knew at the dogs. He didn’t cheer on the dog he had backed. Instead, he shouted at the dog that was leading: “Get back! Get . . . back!” The cheer that unites Europe.