On the face of it, the Ryder Cup shouldn’t work. Shouldn’t still work, at any rate. It ought to be one of those nice ideas that has run out of puff by now, like the Railway Cup or soccer’s B Internationals. At best, it should have been reduced to a skeleton of itself at this stage, held together with sticky tape and the desperation of the TV companies, like we saw with the Lions this summer.
Think about it. You’re taking two groups of pro golfers - the most lone-wolf, self-obsessed, egomaniacal individuals in world sport (plus Shane Lowry) - and for three days out of every 730, asking them to come together as a team. Where else does that actually work?
Tennis has the Davis Cup and the Billie Jean King Cup (the Fed Cup in old money) and both have their constituency. But when it comes right down to it, you’re not asking tennis players to radically change what they do from week to week. Doubles is part of the fabric of professional tennis anyway so the notion of being in a team isn’t as alien to them as it is to golfers.
They know what it is to depend on a partner, to get swept along in their glory when they do well and to bite your tongue when they balls it all up. Golfers know only themselves and their caddies and agents and even then, most of them reckon there’s at least two too many in the circle.
In athletics, the old Europa Cup was great gas until it got squeezed out by the starrier, sexier events in the calendar. It’s still chugging along under the guise of the European Team Championships but it’s a deep cut now, strictly for the fetishists.
Horse racing tries to gin up country versus country events from time to time but nobody bites. The Ireland v England carry-on at Cheltenham is easily the festival's most tiresome aspect and doesn't really exist outside the media anyway. Try telling Rachael Blackmore that coming second in the Gold Cup was no big deal because an Irish horse beat her, see how far you get.
There was a short-lived swimming yoke called the Duel In The Pool in the 2000s, with the US taking on first Australia and later Europe, unabashedly styling itself the Ryder Cup of swimming. It ended after the Yanks won the first seven in a row and the big names in the sport stopped turning up for it.
Square pegs into round holes
The point is, forcing the square pegs of individual sports stars into the round holes of team settings pretty much never works. Yet somehow it works here, in the sport where it absolutely shouldn’t.
This is an event where there is no prizemoney. You’re talking about players who, in the space of a fortnight, go from chasing a first prize of $15m to playing for some nebulous notion of intercontinental pride. Yet they come and do it.
You can say they make enough money already and that's fine. But they don't think like that. If they did, they'd give plainly rotten tournaments like the Saudi International the swerve. The fact that hardly any of them do - including Shane Lowry - shows just how much pro golfers love money. And yet they put it all aside for the Ryder Cup.
Win or lose, you'll get on with your day and not give it another thought.
Even on the playing end of things, it really shouldn’t work. This is an event where in foursomes, they have to play someone else’s ball. Ordinarily, you’d have more chance getting a golfer to swap wives with you rather than play your ball in competition. They spend so much time tinkering, testing and generally convincing themselves that a dimple here and there is the difference between world domination and irrelevance.
Yet for this one event, they are cool with changing it. Justin Thomas spent six months before the 2018 Ryder Cup practising with Jordan Spieth's ball, just so he'd be ready for two foursomes matches in Paris. That's the pull of this kooky and often downright weird event in a nutshell.
And of course, the real reason it shouldn’t work is that it doesn’t matter. Beyond the people involved, nobody actually cares who wins the Ryder Cup. You might think you hate the Yanks with every vessel of your blue and yellow little Euro heart but once you turn the TV off, it’s over. Win or lose, you’ll get on with your day and not give it another thought.
Nobody’s day is going to be ruined by what happens next weekend. No sports fan has ever stewed over a Ryder Cup defeat. There has never been a Mayo-style renting of garments or searching of souls. No ripped-up season ticket in the manner of a relegated Premier League team, no solemn oath sworn never to give your heart to these wasters ever again. They never had your heart and they never will.
The flipside is also true. A Europe win next Sunday will see precisely no outpouring of joy. People will be happy for Pádraig Harrington but no more happy than if he won, say, Celebrity Masterchef. Champagne stocks will be unmoved across the continent. Nobody has ever got the shift in Coppers because of a Ryder Cup win. There will not be a surge of Rorys and Sergios and Viktors when the popular names list comes out at the end of the year.
Irresistible
And yet, it remains a completely unignorable, thoroughly irresistible weekend of sport. Or at least it does, on one crucial proviso - that it remains close. This is the key to any good Ryder Cup. It’s not who wins or loses, it’s not even really who plays well or not. As long as both teams have a chance of winning on Sunday, it’s a great Ryder Cup. Anything less and the air goes out of it very quickly.
It is, in many ways, a nonsense event.
The format is the secret sauce in this regard. It’s very hard for either team to get far enough ahead on Friday and Saturday as to make Sunday a done deal. It means that every match counts, which means that every hole counts, which means that every shot counts, right from the very start.
That’s why the Ryder Cup works. Every reason for it to fall away into irrelevance gets swept away by the drama of a close contest. Or, more accurately, the promise of said drama. There hasn’t been a close one since 2012 so we’re surely due.
It is, in many ways, a nonsense event. A pro competition played for amateur stakes, a trumped-up, made-for-TV piece of sporting contrivance, laid on for fans who couldn’t give less of a rat’s ass who wins or loses and who will immediately forget all about it the second it finishes.
Wouldn’t miss it for the world.
