The RyderCup will be 'epic' all right - an epic of shameless hype, greed, gaudiness and over-the-top security, writes Kathy Sheridan
You may have seen the commercial. Hordes of people downing tools and making their way across O'Connell Bridge wearing the kind of faraway, cattle-prodded expressions usually seen on the Angelus.
And the voice-over: "This will be where the Titans clash . . . This will be where the world is watching . . . This will be the sound of half a billion people holding their breath . . . This will be the Ryder Cup . . . This will be Epic."
Epic. The word hardly begins to describe the breathless, relentless, shameless guff swirling around the Ryder Cup, which runs from September 22nd to 24th.
The budget for the commercial was certainly epic at €5 million, brought to you by AIB of course, the bank that triggered the recent epic €1.2 billion "profit surge" headlines. AIB's Jim Kelly explained the strategy: "We sat down with our agency last year and tried to figure out what angle we were going to take . . . We realised this is much more than a game of golf. For Ireland as a nation this is huge. Then, when someone around the table mentioned the word 'epic', we said that's exactly what the Ryder Cup is in a nutshell."
"Half a billion people holding their breath"? "Much more than a game of golf"? Only in ad land . . .
Well, some numbers have been crunched, as they undoubtedly say in ad land, and they come nowhere near half a billion (still less, the one and a half billion suggested by recent puff pieces). In fact, the Ryder Cup failed to make the top 15 most-watched sporting events last time out in 2004, trailing after the European Championship soccer final between Portugal and Greece, which attracted 153 million viewers. Not peanuts, but not half a billion either.
And Tom Lehman finally put the "more than a game of golf" schtick to bed this week. Musing on recent bereavements, the worryingly combustible captain of this year's US team (last seen attacking his bag with a club during a competition in San Diego), concluded that in the great scheme of things, "it's only a golf match . . . only a sports event".
Who knew? Heck, those of us living within the eight-kilometre "security cordon" around Straffan village thought we were hosting a G8 summit, the Middle East peace talks and a Taliban knees-up.
In reality, it's just 24 millionaires, purporting to live out Sam Ryder's 1927 vision of a competition to "influence a cordial, friendly and peaceful feeling throughout the whole civilised world". With a few rounds of golf.
Which of course explains why all roads in the "security" zone must be closed from "18.00hrs on Sunday, September 17th until 23.59hrs [ precisely] on Sunday, September 24th". While a pleasant community liaison garda was delegated to keep the locals chilled, it seems reasonable to ask why Irish home-owners should be required to submit their guests' passport numbers, date of birth and car registrations, as well as having to supply their own personal details, all to satisfy some overblown security for a wildly over-hyped golf match.
LABOUR DEPUTY EMMET Stagg, who lives in Straffan village, is bemused. "They're expecting 40,000 a day at the Ryder Cup," he says. "There were 39,000 people at the European Open [ in the K Club] this year and we hardly knew it was on . . . though we did, because at least the K Club gives us free tickets for that, unlike the miserable ****s from the Ryder Cup. I can see absolutely no justification for this complete security blackout."
The neurosis over Ryder Cup security is rather baffling. It has been well publicised that the US team is due in Straffan in a couple of weeks for a 48-hour bonding session, three weeks ahead of the main event.
"We'll drink a little Guinness, catch a few trout and have some laughs," said Tom Lehman. So why, if the security threat to Team USA is permanently critical, will we face no road closures then? Americans of all sorts come to Europe and go about their business without wrapping themselves in a special high-risk category or piling on the melodrama - and they don't have the luxury of a chartered jet direct from Washington. The Ryder Cup circus calls to mind a fast-fading pop star affecting to need a retinue of half a dozen unmistakeably beefy security gorillas in suits and shades to "protect" her from all that terrible "intrusion".
During the September 2002 Ryder Cup (postponed for a year after 9/11 and the American team's refusal to play at the Belfry in England), armed police were obliged to patrol the perimeter of the golf course, while inside the American team captain talked tough, predicting that the teams "were going to beat each others' brains out". The American team's strategy? "Punch, counter-punch, snuff him out."
For the 2004 return bout in the US, a perfect storm of hype, contrivance, military jingoism and reckless God-goading found a vent once again in the American captain's pep talk: "We must be resolute. We must not waver. With God's help we will prevail." (They didn't).
Two years on, back at the K Club, a close neighbour of the course is told by gardaí that his yard is in a "high-risk security area because 'they' could launch anything" from it and that "it's not a question of staying open for business but that there's no point in staying open".
Who might "they" be, we speculated? The golfers? Intent on beating each other's brains out? It's fair to say that the Ryder Cup's recent history is not quite the "cordial" affair that old Sam Ryder envisaged, although his notion that a couple of dozen wealthy, almost exclusively white golfers from the West could help to bring about peace and neighbourliness in "the whole civilised world" always seemed a tad optimistic.
While the infamous 1991 "War on the Shore" at Kiawah Island, South Carolina left indelible memories of two US team members sporting combat caps and jackets (no doubt a declaration of solidarity with the boys out in the Gulf, fighting a real war instead of tootling round a country club), Brookline, US, 1999 has become the synonym for the rugged hombres that populate the modern Ryder Cup. That's when Tom Lehman was accused of ditching his Christian-American principles by stomping across the 17th green just as Jose Maria Olazabal was readying to hole a putt that would keep the Europeans in the Ryder Cup. Lehman denies that he led the offensive, but no one denies the yobby American invasion of the green. Brookline is also where an American fan allegedly spat at the English captain's wife.
It couldn't have been for her dress sense, because in the Observer's 10 worst fashion statements in the history of sport, the 1999 US Ryder Cup team came in at number six. The Golfing Wives and Girlfriends (GWAGS) also made a statement of sorts that year with their matching Sindy doll outfits, as indeed they did again in 2002, when they lined up, Stepford-wife style, in identical navy blue skirt suits and calf-high boots.
When the newly-divorced Colin Montgomerie turned up alone for the 2004 event, leaving the GWAGS a woman short, he showed the stuff that made him great, saying he'd never seen the point anyway of an army of wives being such a feature at a "professional man's place of work".
BACK IN STRAFFAN, the K Club is bracing itself for the arrival of the GWAGS, Monty, Tiger, and others of the 120-strong crew of "galácticos", officials and freeloaders. Special orders include imported American beers and Tiger's caffeine-free diet cola. Tiger also gets the three-roomed Viceroy Suite, with the four-poster bed, 60-inch plasma TV screen and sunken jacuzzi.
Whether they - or anyone - will actually get a look at the village outside is an open question. Still, at least the road and building construction lads are providing good business for the sole (very nicely renovated) shop in the village. And the helicopter boys are happy. Although Straffan is located within a military restricted area and the golf course itself will bask in a no-fly zone, helicopter operators (already an intrusive pest around here and begging for a noise pollution test case or something) will be allowed to run up to 600 trips a day during the competition, at a cost of around €900 a head for the 12-minute jolly from the capital. That's about the same degree of movement as Dublin airport sees on a busy day. While the hoi polloi are decanted onto one of 120 double-decker buses to negotiate the narrow little roads to Straffan, the K Club is preparing to handle 300 helicopters on the ground at any one time.
Ah, but won't the spanking new roads and roundabouts - costing an eye-watering €16 million - be a lasting benefit? Maybe. When the pain fades. In early July, when asked if work on access routes would be completed on time, the European Ryder Cup director, Richard Hills, confidently declared: "I fully expect roadworks to be in place." Eh, sorry, just a mo . . . What he meant to say, it transpired, was: "We are confident that the roads will be ready."
According to Emmet Stagg, Straffan's main street has been dug up no fewer than seven separate times in eight months. This week, it was evident that work is being pushed perilously close to the wire, with one road closed for resurfacing, several dusty building sites decidedly unfinished and "a place in history", no less, promised by estate agents to the long-suffering occupants of another nearly-finished housing estate.
When it's all finished, Stagg mordantly predicts, what were once "nice little rural roads" will become a rat run for big lorries, providing a "perfect outer ring" for drivers avoiding the toll.
Is it any wonder that many locals are a tad apprehensive? The pair of four-day tickets allocated to each home within the cordon could have gone some way to compensating them for the fall-out. But the charming folk at Ryder Cup Ltd charged €345 apiece for them, while demanding details of each ticket-holder's passport number, gender and date of birth, just to make sure they couldn't be passed on as a gift (no, really) or given a quick whirl on eBay. That's a stomping total of €690 a house, not to mention the irksome intrusiveness. Among the 13 conditions of sale - "subject to English law" - number 11 states that "in the event of the postponement of the day for which play was intended, the ticket shall not be valid for the rearranged date". Another test case, lawyer friends? But wasn't it ever thus for major money spinners? Apparently, no.
One of Stagg's more startling revelations is that he is something of a Michael Smurfit fan. "I'm certainly very unhappy with the way the local community has been treated by the Ryder Cup and I'd compare that to the way Michael Smurfit and the K Club have contributed to everything in Straffan . . . Michael Smurfit gives us the use of the K Club to run a golf classic every year for the Straffan community. I've found him to be a hard-nosed businessman but very good to the community as well as being a good and clean employer." The great man has also promised to hand over six (stunningly valuable) acres for the soccer club, says Stagg. Really? "We shook hands on it."
As for the Ryder Cup, they have no idea how to deal with a community, he asserts. "The best I can say about it from the country's point of view is that it's a milking machine for the super-rich who - I am happy to say - come mainly from abroad."
Over the past year, all the rip-off accusations have been focused on simple householders trying to bleed an honest €20,000 short-term rental or so from gullible, rich Americans (but who discovered, alas, that "gullible" and "rich" are mutually exclusive on any continent). Such allegations served a purpose, though, knocking the spotlight off those who were going about it more discreetly.
THE GOVERNMENT DECIDED four years ago that, despite its absolute fabulousness, a TV free-to-air Ryder Cup wasn't worth fighting for, so the organisers manage to keep Sky on-side while both of them rake in the dosh (always remembering that there's no prize money on offer for this event). The horrific fall-out for ordinary punters was articulated by Labour's spokesman for sport, Jack Wall TD, who wailed that "many sports fans will be driven into pubs in order to catch a glimpse of the Ryder Cup".
Those who shrink from such a terrible fate might note that Portmarnock, that bastion of social and gender equality, is offering an alternative golf/lunch/ big screen package for a quick €750, or what amounts to the highest green fee in Irish golfing history.
Less self-important spectators intent on travelling by road will have to pitch up at one of the two tremendously profitable park-and-ride facilities about six miles away, and pay €20 for parking and the privilege of a double-decker ride to the course with obligatory ID checks on the double.
Meanwhile, many hotels with less than a five-star reputation have been demanding five-star prices with minimum stay conditions. Many restaurants were demanding 25 per cent deposits on large parties six months ago. "Several hotels are charging €500 a night. I can think of only two hotels in Dublin that would justify charges of €500 a night," says an industry insider. "It's the same with restaurants. The Irish are used to it; it's what they've come to expect. But the industry is not catering for Irish people here. People are not stupid. There are companies coming into Ireland for the first time for this. Do you think they will be back?"
Six months ago, a leading American tour operator was already talking about accommodating people up in the northwest, away from "the crazy prices" around Dublin. And how many of them have been scared off by last week's "Heathrow terror" headlines remains to be seen.
The last word on the sport and its aficionados must go to Matt Doyle, resident of Straffan and "a proud member of the K Club". He was venting his anger, via letters to the editor, about a coruscatingly witty piece carried in this paper, in which a leading US golf writer, Bruce Selcraig, joked that Argentinian TV viewers watching the Ryder Cup this year will imagine that everyone in Ireland drives a Mercedes.
"Just because [ Selcraig] took a vow of poverty by becoming a journalist does not mean the rest of us had to," wrote Doyle. "By the way, if there were only Mercedes in the car park it must have been ladies' day or children's day. On a men's day it would have been Bentleys and Aston Martins."
That'll tell 'em.