`It's all about the honour of the, eh, continent.' Lee Westwood, 1999
This weekend the Ryder Cup is back in Massachusetts where it began. The visitors arrived by Concorde instead of by boat as they did in 1927. That is as fitting a metaphor as any for the changing face of a competition which has become vacuous, mean and empty.
People will announce breathlessly this weekend that the Ryder Cup is the second biggest sporting event on planet earth, that it will be watched by 700 million people, that in its promulgation of pan-European pride it will unite the imagination of the humble goatherd in Uzbekistan with that of the drunken sailor in Sofia and the chartered accountant in Tunbridge Wells.
Twenty-four very wealthy men linked by nothing more than a common love of blazers are playing golf for three days, playing for the very honour of their continental land masses. People will tell you that it is "war", that these V-necks are being "unleashed" on each other, that they will be parsimony itself in the matter of giving or expecting "quarter". The Ryder Cup is about pride.
Use garlic to fend these people off. If that fails, try driving a stake through the Pringle logo over the heart. The Ryder Cup may be the most ballyhooed, hyped and hoopla'd sporting event on the planet, but feeding as it does on a crude, synthetic, brand of ersatz nationalism and a feverish pursuit of the poshest demographic, it is merely a creation of convenience.
It started out as a marketing wheeze which never really took off and for better or worse that's what the Ryder Cup has remained. And the biting irony of the whole affair is that now they've found the correct formulae for both the competition and the marketing they're killing the thing.
Played to its original principles of cordiality among golfers of the old world, the Ryder Cup had no corporate future, exploited as a war between Europe and the USA it will devour itself. Players are already pouty about the money they make from the thing. David Duval has spoken about the possibility of top players staying away from the competition (as they often did in the past). "It could happen this September. More than likely though in 2001. It's imminent. This is just from talking to the guys. Some of them are fed up. Without the players they're not going to have the Ryder Cup."
In Europe, players are a little more tight-lipped about money, as if connecting lucre with the game is the equivalent of confessing to impure thoughts about Dana.
In reality, though, what is happening in Brookline, Massachusetts this weekend is a corporate exhibition match. The media soup it up with talk of war, the players discreetly press for reward commensurate with the income being drawn from the record 59 corporate tents which make this particular golf course Schmoozeville Central for three days.
There will be talk this weekend which has echoed down through the 72 years of the competition's existence that the Ryder Cup is a congregation of the greatest players in the world - which must be news to Ernie Els, Nick Price, Greg Norman, David Frost, Mark McNulty et al who by dint of nationality are ineligible to play.
Europe playing the USA at golf, with all the attendant pretensions that the game is war, is merely a garish emphasising of the economic hegemony of the first world. By claiming the Ryder Cup as its great global event, the sport of golf merely underlines its cashmered exclusivity.
By 1927, when the Ryder Cup was born, the competition had already been played a couple of times in one form or another, but became formalised into the Ryder Cup. The idea had been mooted in 1920 at an annual general meeting of the Professional Golfer's Association. The tournament was the brainchild of James Harnett, a circulation manager for Golf Illustrated magazine, and the plan was to increase his magazine's circulation by establishing a regular fixture.
A daffy old seed merchant called Samuel Ryder was so enamoured with the notion of the thing that he put up a cup for the event, noting dreamily that: "I trust that the effect of this match will be to influence a cordial, friendly, and peaceful feeling throughout the whole civilised world."
Spoken indeed like a Miss World contestant. A trophy was minted. Sam Ryder copped $100 for it. Golf Illustrated matched that and the Royal and Ancient golf club dropped $50 into the pot. Without excessive fanfare the Ryder Cup was born. The original format enshrined in a long-since disregarded Deed of Trust was four foursomes (alternate shots) matches played over 36 holes on Day One with Day Two turned over to singles matches played over 36 holes. A few hundred spectators turned up, the chaps wore jackets and ties all the way. And that was it. America won easily. Again and again and again. Nineteen wins and one tie out of the first 23 stagings of the tournament.
In America, apathy slowly gnawed away at the competition like woodworm. The Great Britain and Ireland team grew into the role of plucky underdogs, a species Americans have little time for. The competition was all but dead until Jack Nicklaus came up with the wheeze of adding the rest of Europe to the mix.
Still, it took a while. As recently as 1989 the rights to the Ryder Cup were sold to a cable network in the US for as little as $200,000. NBC liked the look of the figures the little cable network racked up for so little outlay and bought in to the Ryder Cup.
Once NBC adopt a sport, reality ceases to be a factor. The Ryder Cup would enter an era of bawdy, pantomime style, nationalism. It started with the Kiawah Island match in 1991, a game of golf which was sold relentlessly as the "War on the Shore" cashing in cynically on the Gulf War fever still sweating America's brow. This weekend's exhibition is, of course, the Battle of Brookline. In 2005 we may have the Carnage at Kildare.
The competition has grown and players seeing the main chance in the martial theme have played along with the notion that they are, ho hum, very proud to be representing their particular continental land mass.
In terms of modern sport or modern television, the Ryder Cup remains relatively small beer. NBC paid $4.5 million for Valderamma in 1997 and has stumped $10 million per event for 1991, 2001 and 2005.
The press bumph and the press evangelists will tell you that 700 million will watch the Ryder Cup this weekend. They won't 700 million will have the opportunity to watch it. In the US, in 1995 4.5 million US viewers watched the competition and 4.2 million tuned in 1997. The Ryder Cup sold itself meanwhile to Sky Sport in Britain, thus exchanging the potential mass audience it needed for some Murdoch magic beans.
To provide perspective (a prohibited commodity in Brookline) the Ryder Cup is a minnow in terms of modern television. The NFL has $18 billion worth of TV deals in America, one episode of ER costs NBC $13 million to purchase. The Superbowl draws more than 100 million US viewers, a new ER episode draws 2O million minimum, last month 10 million Americans watched a meaningless Hall of Fame exhibition football game.
What makes the Ryder Cup worth packaging and fussing over is the wealth of the audience, not the size of it. There were 600 million rounds of golf played in the US last year, but the spend on the hardware for golf ran into the billions. Better news still is that the golfing audience has a remarkable retention for the names of sponsors. In a recent survey only 9.7 per cent of Americans pronounced themselves "very interested" in golf but 72.2 per cent of those could accurately recall the names of golf sponsors.
The Ryder Cup had some validity as a quaint expression of cordiality between old friends, but having been tinkered with endlessly it has become vulgarised and counterfeit.
The national pride business grafted onto the event is one-sided and corny. Europe, with wars bursting like festering boils along its borders, doesn't move as a single unit in any other sporting sphere. Nobody grows up dreaming of playing for Europe. There is no common race memory of great Europe moments. And the "love of the game" argument is worn thin. Players benefit hugely from Ryder Cup exposure and they want to benefit more.
This week the players will be receiving pocket money of $5,000 a head for participating. This is the subject of much thumbsucking and longfaces. The official line from all concerned is that the profit turned by the competition goes to charity and that all else is patriotic duty, honour and noble self-sacrifice.
Of course it's not. Playing on the Ryder Cup team at the end of every second season is a shot of testosterone for any golfer's marketing portfolio. There is a nominal fee of $5,000 for playing, plus the backdoor fee introduced this year whereby Ryder's Cup and President's Cup players got to play in the $5 million World Golf Championships in Akron, Ohio, where first place got $1 million and last place in the field was guaranteed $25,000.
Last time out at Valderamma in Spain Darren Clarke was set to win a $180,000 Ferrari from his sponsors if he got through the weekend undefeated.
You'll hear less whining about money and more guff about pride in the little ole continent from the Europeans, incidentally, because the European PGA has taken to allowing courses to bid for the right to host the competition. The $10 million or so stumped up by the winner goes back into the Tour.
And of course just because golf says it gives money to charity doesn't mean you can tell the Simon Community to stop bothering you next time you see a collection tin. The principle beneficiary of the Ryder Cup "charities" is, well, golf. Some $6 million will go to Brookline golf club, $13 million from each Ryder Cup is earmarked for the Ryder Cup Outreach Programme, a grassroots maintenance system which creates golf learning centres for kids. The cream-off goes towards growing the golf market, in other words. A further $2.5 million from each Ryder Cup match is funnelled back into the PGA tour again directly benefiting the players.
What charm the Ryder Cup briefly held as a viable and genuinely competitive event has been lost in the bellicose posturing, insane money-grabbing and poor sportsmanship of the 1990s.
The vulgar bidding wars have begun for the right to stage the thing, the players squeeze a little bit harder every time the competition is played. Cashmere-sweatered golfers are the primo suckers of the sports market. Big spenders. Recurring spenders. The cashing in will continue.
The Ryder Cup is a no-win event. Until Europe was dragooned into the game to even the sides up, the Ryder Cup was a loser beset by media apathy and player indifference. Now that it is competitive, those aspects which Ryder Cup proponents claim make the competition special just don't exist any more.