Right, let’s get cracking. The Ryder Cup is here again and you’ve only got three more days of previews to trudge through before all this media-driven hand-wringing, chin-stroking, eulogising, demonising, pondering and predicting mercifully gets overtaken by some actual ruddy golf. The transatlantic tussle’s biennial phoney war should be accompanied by a wireless broadcast from Churchill.
Since the last outbreak of hostilities at Hazeltine in 2016, it’s been two years of captains doing this and captains doing that under ther glare of near 24/7, high-definition Ryder Cup hysteria-vision.
Over a weekend in Paris, a lot of the chatter will no doubt centre around what those captains do or don’t do even though the 24 players involved will do things that the captains will not want them to do but will do it anyway because the very nature of golf means that you can easily do things you don’t mean to do even though you’re trying your best to do the things you want to do and not the things you don’t want to do. Fair dos?
I don’t know about you but I’ve always found the cult of the captain in the Ryder Cup somewhat peculiar. This is a man, after all, who passes a lot of time glowering, careering about on a buggy and whispering into a walkie-talkie.
There are not many sports where the skipper spends over 20 months preparing for a three-day event during which the only direct influence he can exert is the order in which he scribbles down a number of names from a list of players he has, by and large, had little part in selecting.
Back in ye day, the captain’s role seemed to be fairly straight forward. “Boys, let me tell you something,” said Ben Hogan to his US troops of 1967. “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to do this job. I’m going to pair straight hitters with straight hitters and crooked hitters with crooked hitters so you won’t find yourselves in unfamiliar places.”
It’s a bit more scientific these days, of course. Well, so it’s portrayed anyway. Whatever the result on Sunday, Thomas Bjorn and Jim Furyk, the respective leaders of Europe and the US, will be either revered as some kind of mastermind who has harnessed and dictated the ebb and flow of events with a shrewd tactical nous or damned as a complete nincompoop who couldn’t organise a whist drive at the Day Centre.
“What can a captain do, apart from the speeches?” said Tom Watson. “Sure, the pairings and all that, but it’s still all about the golf they play.” Watson may have been the last US captain to win on European soil in 1993 but his words came home to roost when he performed the role again in 2014 and his gnarled, old-school ethos of “just play better” was gruesomely savaged by Phil Mickelson. But those are the perils of the job. A player can simply not perform and be absolved of any blame. Equally, he can be a star and the captain is viewed as an inspirational colossus. Either way, the player can’t really lose.
In this game of fine margins, there’s a fine line too between masterstrokes and madness. Paul McGinley, for instance, had a tank of yellow and blue fish plonked in the European team room during his victorious captaincy in 2014 while a picture of a clump of rock being lashed by the waves of a tempest, accompanied by the message, “we will be the rock when the storm arrives”, was held up as a coup de maitre in the arts of nurturing passion, focus and resilience.
Had Europe lost, though, McGinley could have been a laughing stock. “Should we just flush these fish doon the toilet Mr McGinley? . . . . and what aboot this thingymebob wi’ the rock?”
When Paul Azinger led the US to glory in 2008, his use of pod systems and perceived Eisenhower-esque leadership ended up in a book called ‘Cracking the Code’ in which the Ryder Cup captaincy was elevated to the kind of lauded cryptanalysis you used to get at Bletchley Park. “I thought you were going to show me something today, you’re showing me squat,” Azinger roared to Anthony Kim. Ah, the soaring oratory.
Is there a right way – Tony Jacklin, Sam Torrance, McGinley et al – or a wrong way – Hal Sutton, Nick Faldo and the rest?
Apparently there is. And we’ll find out on Sunday night . . .
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