Ryder view: Get up late. Full of foreboding. Two Bloody Marys and a Prozac for breakfast. Note mention of self in newspaper's ad for its Ryder Cup coverage. Billed as being drafted to K Club in order to take "sideways look" at Ryder Cup. Assume "sideways look" is Irish Times speak for being in K Club to "rip the **** out of Ryder Cup" before being evicted.
Am well equipped for fearless "sideways look" duty. A sceptic walking among the bucklepping cured of Lourdes.
Watch opening ceremony on television until such time as I have passed, begorrah, into a coma. Weep to see Donal Lunny up there. I have admired that man's bouzouki for the last time. Chuckled to see Society Smurfit in his Special K sweater. Scribble down that there are many things wrong with the Ryder Cup, the fact that Society Smurfit can just buy the dog-and-pony show being just one of them.
Note that the Ryder Cup has come to Ireland at just the right time. The last kick of the astonishingly vulgar Celtic Tiger! Crass corporate elitism meets native genius for price gouging and pat insincerity! Will develop these bulletpoint thoughts in the Seafood and Champagne tent later. "Much wrong here," says last significant pre-coma entry in notebook.
Today, though, embedded deep inside the scanger exclusion zone it is clear that what's most wrong about the Ryder Cup is the uniforms. Concept and execution. It's hideously retrograde to make the poor golf Wags (Gwags?) all dress the same way, but when you see the dubious stuff the boys are sent out in it's understandable that they would want to spread the sartorial suffering. The Europeans showed up looking like trainee Compustore salesmen. Avocado sweaters, boys? Padraig Harrington gave up a career in accountancy to wear this?
The Americans have opted for a diamond-pattern look which made them look like a rotary club hoping to finish golfing in time to catch the special early-bird menu somewhere nice.
Follow Harrington, Tiger and co around for a little while. Shrewd, sideways thinking here.
Love Harrington (in a manly, non-Euro way). Woods always loses his opening-day games (seven flops in a row since Valderrama in 1997, thanks, Statto) so there'll be Tricolours to wave and damp squibs to enjoy. Don't believe that Tiger Woods believes the Ryder Cup hokum but Padraig always has that fierce expression on his face when he plays Ryder Cup. Looks like he's playing corner back for Ballyboden in the last minute of a tense county final. Harrington might make a believer of me.
At hole 13 just after I join the procession Tiger spends a long time in the portaloo just below the tee box. People say he's nervous. Can't swallow that. Lip-balm crisis, apparently.
There's high good humour in following Padraig, Monty, Tiger and Furyk, though. It's not PC anymore to shout "G'wan, Missus Doubtfire" at Monty, which is a pity because he's fun when he's riled. Furyk has a stroke like a man strangling a recalcitrant turkey, which draws gasps. Padraig and Tiger look like the class swots trying to play their neatest golf beside them.
Trouble is the standard is woeful. Woods is bad but there's no pleasure in that for even the most ardent European because the Ryder Cup, uniquely, betrays the cruel, lonely spirit of golf, by allowing team-mates to bail each other out.
Furyk saves Tiger's bacon a few times.
Tag along for a few holes of hollering and harooing. Mystifying level of excitement. The golf is poor. At 16, Woosie materialises and starts chatting away to Padraig while the rest of us are obediently keeping quiet.
Padraig keeps staring straight ahead as if it's all some kind of test.
Confession. I am not rigid with excitement every time I see Ian Woosnam. Personally (does this make me a bad European?), I like Tom Lehman better than I like Woosie. Tom looks like that cop in the movies, the decent old avuncular sarge who has just a week to retirement but now he's got to shift this damn Ryder Cup case from his desk. Then he can go and play with his grandchildren and take the cat pole-fishing, or pole-dancing, or whatever.
I don't know if Tom stepped on the green at Brookline after Justin Leonard's putt seven years ago. Being one hundred per cent honest about it, I don't care either. I know that Woosie is fluent in 19 languages and is as revered a figure in the Carpathians as he is in the Welsh Valleys or the Norwegian fjords, it's just that I always picture Woosie in a medallion with a Kiss Me Quick hat on. That image makes me come over all Society Smurfit about it.
This weakness (which dare not speak its name) for Lehman may be very un-European but that's golf, is it not? More than any other sport it's about individuals. It's about driving for show and putting for dough. It's about being alone.
Because I'm such a knee-jerk Mick about stuff, I've never seen Harrington or McGinley in a golf tournament I didn't want them to win. After that, though, I like Mickelson. I like Furyk. I like ole Tom Lehman. Best golfer of all time? Ben Hogan, the prickliest of individualists. I'm pro European expansion and anti American foreign policy but I don't get the Ryder Cup. Not even when Padraig and Tiger are standing there on the tee box right in front of me.
And how absurdly excited we get. Go Europe! Listen, I loved Paul McGinley waving the Tricolour . I liked Philip Walton. I wouldn't have got remotely the same primal stir if Paul had waved the committee-designed European flag over his head.
Yet I am forced to believe that The K Club is filled with staunch Europeans who have been fattened on our grotesque media exaggerations. You know the stuff? About the whole world grinding to a halt as it waits to see whether a golf ball hit by a member of the European Guild of Golf Pros drops or not.
Consider the out-of-kilter coverage of the thing. Yesterday this paper carried 10,958 words on the Ryder Cup before a ball was struck. On Thursday, the Indo managed a prolific 13,064 words out of a practice day. These are magnificent numbers but consider that two years ago when the cup was Stateside, the New York Times on Monday morning carried a 900-word report and an 800-word column from Dave Anderson.
Sufficient unto the event was the coverage thereof.
Consider also that yesterday morning the Chicago Tribune carried a restrained 796 words on the pending hoopla. The NY Times carried about 60 words more. Note also the Chi Tribune found time to wisely point out what others have been saying: Society Smurfit's personal capture of the Ryder Cup means that "the players will be competing on a course that's about as Irish as matzo ball soup".
See, nobody else is quite as fascinated or charmed by us as we are.
We may have invented golf in Europe and co-opted virtually the entire island to facilitating golf but it's quintessentially the American game and playing it on a sodden parkland pastiche of an American course and getting all excited about Yurp beating America seems a little odd.
So the day is spent scouring for the solace in old-fashioned bits of nationalism. Things with which to sustain the interest. Sticking Padraig Harrington and Paul McGinley together for the afternoon helped enormously. Cheers, Woosie.
The cup grinds on, a mystery to those untouched by its charms. Inexorable and unavoidable, too big for its origins. For two more days we are all Europeans. Indeed when I text my friend Yordi, a humble goatherd in the Urals, he texts back to say he won't be herding today till well after the foursomes. Even the goats can wait.
