It’s hard to get revved up about watching golf, that most middle class of sports which makes such terrible television viewing. And then there is the Ryder Cup.
I’m Scottish and being truthful, I would struggle to support most Great Britain teams such is my apathy for an English majority in sport. The Brits it appears have in turn a total apathy for all things EU, given their recent voting record.
And knowing many of my continental European friends, there’s also plenty of division amongst nations there and their very own apathy for the British voting record.
Golf is the most pointless of sports in many regards. There are versions of myself all over the world who have had thousands of lessons and spent ten times those hours at the driving range and remain inherently useless at the sport.
Television viewing is challenging, you spend most of the time watching the players kneeling or bent over studying the gradients of a 5 metre stretch of manicured lawn. We can appreciate the skill but there’s not a whole lot of need to tune in other than a few Sundays a year for the majors.
And then there is the Ryder Cup.
Scottie Scheffler played with Team USA in the 2023 Ryder Cup. (Photo by Andrew Redington/Getty Images)
Now if you are not European (and this is a stretch of the very definition) or from the USA, you may not particularly care, and this article may not be for you either. But the Ryder Cup has the capacity to turn the most docile and casual sports fan into the most rabid and tribalistic golf fan.
I do get it to a degree with the American fans, they are a single nation of course, the stars and stripes are emotive for them, we have all heard the fans chanting ‘US-A US-A’, they get behind their team as we all do when we support our own country in sports, except this is golf.
It’s hard to recall when this shift happened in the Ryder Cup, but I remember in the early 90s being unable to afford cable TV and being glued to the radio on a Sunday evening listening to the drama. Why?
Golf is the most individual of sports and in many ways the most quietly watched, with polite applause the order of the day for a holed putt. It’s also a hard sport to watch in person given the logistics and it’s hard for crowds to congregate in an organised fashion for this reason.
Italy, where the 2023 Ryder Cup was held, is hardly known as a hotbed of golf (granted, we have had the Molinari brothers), yet the galleries are on fire. Missed putts by the Americans were met with utter fervor from a crowd more akin to one you would find at a football match.
It is also bizarre how this emotion transmits across the television to your home (if like in my case you have suddenly become very European). As a Chelsea fan, Justin Rose’s last putt felt like Didier Drogba’s winning penalty in the Champions League final – this is utter nonsense; golf should not do this to you.
Matt Fitzpatrick played for Team Europe at the 2023 Ryder Cup. (Photo by Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images)
The players even behave entirely differently on the course. There is obviously the change to a team environment but even then, they are only ever with a maximum of one other person, it remains an individual challenge but their reaction to good and bad shots and their interaction with the crowd is unrecognisable. They are behaving like footballers.
The only meaningful comparison I can think of is the Davis Cup, where wonderfully remunerated individual sports people are thrust into a team environment. It does create emotion and I have seen that, but nothing on the level of ferocity that the Ryder Cup does. There are of course other team golf events but again they don’t get close to this. The LIV format last year bombed in team terms. Why does this event change people so much?
The Ryder Cup is a vastly elitist, quirky event seemingly from another time that really doesn’t bother the vast majority of the global population, but for those who have suddenly become the most rabid of golf fans with a wonderful new sense of identity, it is the most compelling of viewing.
I will soon forget about golf and return to my daily grind of mulling over Chelsea’s recent travails and dreaming up new ways for Scotland to not qualify for the European Championships. But on that Sunday evening, I was the most European of Europeans, climbing the proverbial walls as golfers I barely think about 51 weeks of a year knocked a small ball a few metres across those manicured lawns.
It is the Ryder Cup.
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