THESE are gloomy, downbeat times. In fact, things seem to be so sombre, I opened my energy bill the other day while whistling Requiem in D Minor. 

Now that we all reach for our thermostats and radiator knobs with the same kind of nervous, indecisive hovering and footering you’d adopt if you were forced to tickle the snout of a sleeping alligator, the relentless tales of millionaire golfers being offered millions and millions to join some breakaway Saudi Super League has provided us with absolutely no comfort whatsoever.

So, with that in mind, I’m going to avoid talking about all these millions. Well, for a few paragraphs at least. Let’s veer off instead to the Ryder Cup captaincy.

In the modern era, the role of a Ryder Cup skipper has been elevated to such a venerated status, the position should come with its own marble plinth. Such exalted status brings its pressures, of course. 

Win that little gold chalice and you’ll be worshipped like Zeus. Lose and you’ll attract the kind of withering condemnation that greets anything that comes out of the mouth of Nadine Dorries.

After Europe’s walloping at Whistling Straits last year, everybody was expecting Lee Westwood to be given the captain’s armband for the 2023 tussle in Rome. But then Westwood withdrew himself from consideration and Europe’s chain of assumed succession, which seems to have captains in place for the next 100 years, was somewhat disrupted. Luke Donald has emerged as the favourite to take up the reins and certainly has plenty of backing among the current crop of players.

In an interview out in Dubai with my good friend Martin Dempster last week, former Ryder Cup man Andrew Coltart belatedly flung Paul Lawrie’s hat into the ring. It was a thoroughly merited call and one that, perhaps, should’ve been hollered more loudly down the years.

With a plethora of potential candidates stacking up in recent seasons, it seemed that Lawrie was too far down the pecking order to be considered. Why that should be the case, though, remains something of a mystery when you think about it.

Here is a major champion, a multiple tour winner, a two-time Ryder Cup player and a staunch supporter of the European circuit who ticks all sorts of boxes. He was a vice-captain too in Darren Clarke’s 2016 set-up. While Thomas Bjorn and Padraig Harrington, who were also part of that backroom team at Hazeltine, went on to become captains in 2018 and 2021 respectively, Lawrie’s credentials have been overlooked.

Rather like Sandy Lyle before him, Lawrie’s hopes of performing a task he’d “love to do” have, realistically, passed him by. That Lyle did not earn the captaincy remains somewhat lamentable given that he was part of a famous five of European golfers who were all born within a year of each other and amassed 16 majors among them during a barnstorming spell of prosperity.

Nick Faldo, Seve Ballesteros, Bernhard Langer and Ian Woosnam all had stints as Ryder Cup skipper with varying degrees of success. Faldo, for instance, employed his own ego as a vice-captain and was about as popular as the emergence of a new variant of the coronavirus. While his reign ended in dismal defeat, the other three all got to the savour the victorious popping of celebratory champagne corks.

Poor old Sandy, meanwhile, never did get his crack at the captaincy. “There is a slight unfairness about it,” he once said of a snub that cut him deeply. “I was due, definitely.”

Lawrie’s not the type to make a big song and dance about it but the 53-year-old would be justified in feeling as aggrieved as his celebrated countryman. When it comes to the Ryder Cup, sometimes the captain’s cap doesn’t fit.

AND ANOTHER THING

The sums are astronomical. And, no, I’m not taking about my gas bill again. The other day, it was reported that Bryson DeChambeau had been offered around £100m to be the poster boy of a Saudi Super League. Ian Poulter, apparently, has been teased with about £22m and a whole host of others have signed a Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) forbidding any public discussions.

Greg Norman, the man helping to drive the Saudi assault on the global game though the LIV Golf Investments company, had a pop at those questioning the Kingdom’s moves and motives last week during the launch of an Asian Tour event in England and said, “if you pre-judge anybody without knowing the facts, then shame on you." And now these facts are shrouded behind a series of NDAs? Oh, the irony.

Amid all this, the bold Phil Mickelson ranted off to Golf Digest magazine and lambasted the “obnoxious greed” of the PGA Tour for not allowing him to earn more than the multi-millions he’s already earned in his career. 

He said this while standing on Saudi Arabian turf having accepted a huge case load of cash to play there. As an act of self-parody, it was broadly equivalent to a bloated Elvis mumbling his way through a series of Vegas ballads in a rhinestone jumpsuit.

While us mere mortals gazed at the three-bar fire and wondered how much it would cost to turn it up, it was difficult to find much sympathy for big Phil pleading poverty.