LockerRoom: So another major over and done with and all the time the Ryder Cup looks more an anachronism than ever. Not since 1999 when Jose Maria Olazabal won the US Masters and Paul Lawrie scooped the British Open has a European lifted a major trophy in golf.
In the meantime the big baubles belong to America or an interesting list from what old colonials might call the Rest of the World.
Geoff Ogilvy, Michael Campbell, Retief Goosen, Mike Weir, Vijay Singh and Ernie Els are all recent winners of Majors who aren't eligible for the hypefest at the K Club.
Add to that list names like Adam Scott, Trevor Immelman, Stuart Appleby, Angel Cabrera and more. Their absence subtracts somewhat from the supposed excellence of what the Ryder Cup offers. Yet as the countdown intensifies we will have to listen to more and more extravagant claims about the merits of a clumsy team competition contrived for the all the usual suspects to make off like bandits with bagfuls of swag.
We will be told the Ryder Cup comes after only the World Cup and the Olympic Games in terms of world viewership. The standard nonsense trotted out in ads and by breathless PR hucksters is that the Ryder Cup has a global audience of one billion Pringle wearers from high-handicap goatherds in the Urals to swinging surfer dudes in California. The figure of one billion represents the people who might be able to switch on the Ryder Cup in their living-rooms if a man was standing pointing a gun at them and screaming to be shown some distorted version of golf.
In 2004, the last time the Ryder Cup was played, the competition failed to make the top 15 most-watched sports events of that year. Data collected from 57 major TV markets accounting for 90 per cent of TV households globally had the European Championship final between Portugal and Greece comfortably ahead with 153 million viewers. Next came the Olympic Games opening and closing ceremonies, bafflingly popular. The list continues on down through the Superbowl and Monaco Grand Prix and other events.
The myopia of those who promote the Ryder Cup as a meaningful global event on the basis of spurious viewing figures is best judged by the remarkable statistic concerning a one-day cricket Test a few years ago between Pakistan and India. Some 600 million tuned in. You better believe it was a meaningful TV experience. We have no precise viewing figures to hand for the Asian Games but the notion that a minority, white, middle-class pastime is pulling in more viewers is a nonsense.
The Ryder Cup as recently as 1989 was floating around in the rights pool and got picked out by NBC for a bargain $200,000. In 2004 NBC paid just $18 million for the rights to the thing and were disappointed when audiences were just a fraction of what they had been for the previous US edition, in Brookline in 1999. Brookline was a success and NBC reckoned 55 million Americans saw all or some of it on TV. This figure was halved for 2004.
As things stand, US networks are willing to put relatively little into golf. NBC have paid $894 million for the 2008 Olympics. NFL costs US networks $500 million a year. Baseball costs $417 million a year. Nascar (more below) has risen to $200 million a year and will take a huge jump next time out. Golf with its overlong season and long hours of coverage to the top end of the market pulls down just $162 million
In this neck of the woods, the shindig is on pay per view, which generally puts paid to our chances of stumping up the balance on the billion viewers. Sky expect five to six million punters to shell out, and it is worth remembering, given the anguish of various pols about the fact the operation isn't free to air, that the Government decided as far back as 2002 not to bother pursuing the option of a terrestrial-TV fest.
Golf, for various social and economic reasons, is not a mass spectator sport. What it does is deliver a desirable sector of the market to some sponsors and advertisers selling luxury goods to that section of the market. Pay per view isn't a problem.
(The other end of the scale in America these days is Nascar, a pure redneck delicacy that is leaving golf and other sports in the ha'penny place when it comes to audiences. You think it's a coincidence Disney have produced movies like Cars and Herbie: Fully Loaded in such a short time or that there is so much excitement in the US about the forthcoming Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, which features Will Ferrell as a Nascar driver? Nope, Nascar delivers bewilderingly big audiences, so much so that the sport claims with some justification to be behind only NFL as the viewing choice of US couch potatoes. The TV rights to Nascar have already been sold in 150 nations.)
The fact is golf has a problem and the Ryder Cup isn't going to solve it. The gulf between the European Tour and the big time in America continues to grow, and even in the US too many tournaments and too few decent personalities are crucifying the game. Viewing figures for events like the Billy Bobs Cookies Greater Mudville Invitational have gone through the floor and pretty much the only thing that draws a big audience is Tiger Woods in a red shirt charging towards yet another title. Even Phil Mickelson, who one would have thought was a personable enough sort of cove, stinks the place out, ratings-wise, when he wins a tournament.
And the trouble is that this Ryder Cup will be the fifth in succession in which Tiger has been the youngest player on the US team. There has been no follow through of young prodigies springing from the ghettos with Big Berthas in one hand and endorsement contracts in the other. Guys like Notah Begay , Charles Howell and Matt Kucher have fallen away. Woods has turned 30 now, his prime years devoted to winning and the pursuit of corporate blandness. Behind him in age, the only American in the world's top 50 is Lucas Glover, ranked 48. He's 26 and not about to become your idol.
What's interesting on golf isn't what comes from the Old World as represented in the exclusivity of the Ryder Cup but the players springing from the New World - the Australians, the Africans, the New Zealanders, the players who must look on in utter bemusement as the great caravan of blather cranks up for the K Club.
Somehow ordinary viewers have connected with that fact more crisply than the people who run golf have. In January of this year ABC television in the US dropped golf from its schedules altogether. They got a little bit back in February when in a bizarre trade which also involved (this is true) the rights to the image of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, ABC were given the rights to Friday coverage of the Ryder Cup by NBC in exchange for a commentator, Al Michaels.
TV companies who spent big on golf when Tigermania was at its height late in the last century have been whining ever since about losing their shirts.
Golf as it was played for the last few days at the Open is a wonder to watch. One man against the course, the pressure building incrementally the closer you get to Sunday afternoon. It's quixotic and epic and there are very few people on the planet who can hack it at that level. Fewer and fewer of those people are from the Old World.
In fact looking at the result of major tournaments for the last six or seven years, you could say none of the folks who can hack it are from Europe.
Yet we'll let the Ryder Cup distort the game once more in a few weeks. We'll pretend it's Formula One, but it's just stock-car racing around a stately house. Vijay and Ernie and young Adam Scott will look on and maybe see the humour in it all.
