On Wednesday September 12, 2001, a small item about golf appeared in the British media. It was not front-page news, because holding on to a sense of proportion was something everyone was struggling to do at the time - this being the day after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. However, as bathetic and distasteful as it may seem, a legitimately urgent golfing aspect to the events of 9/11 was already demanding attention, within 24 hours of the first plane hitting in Manhattan. The 34th Ryder Cup was scheduled to be contested by teams from Europe and America at the end of September 2001, at the Belfry, near Birmingham. In the light of events, should it go ahead or not? What on earth was the right thing to do in these exceptional circumstances? To cancel it? To postpone it? To go ahead and play it, but tone down the usual rabid jingoism? How about playing the first two days - of four-somes and fourballs - but then ditching the singles on the Sunday, which is usually when the trouble starts? Oh for heaven’s sake how can we even think about golf at a time like this? Over the next few days, there was a proper flap, and it seemed right that golf - with its well-established passion for rectitude - should be the sport forced to handle such a thorny issue. Here was a golfing etiquette puzzler that even the Royal and Ancient’s exhaustive rule book seemed not to have dreamed up an answer to.
Football just went ahead, of course. True, uefa postponed a Manchester United match against Olympiakos in Athens on the Wednesday, but back in the uk, eight Worthington Cup ties were played regardless. Hugh McIlvanney (writing magisterially in the Sunday Times on September 16) was so shocked by this that he made comparisons with the 1972 Munich Olympics, and the monstrous decision of the International Olympic Committee’s president Avery Brundage to press on with the games despite the appalling murder of eleven Israeli athletes. ‘Brundage justified continuing as a refusal to yield to evil,’ wrote McIlvanney, ‘but to me the subsequent competition for medals was soulless, a circus in a graveyard.’ Noting what other commentators had said - that here was surely a great opportunity to play the Ryder Cup in a sober and civilised manner - McIlvanney refused to be budged. ‘Would it be sport, or a contrived exercise in social therapy? The results of games should never matter too much. But if they don’t matter at all, nobody should bother to play.’
Elsewhere some quick (but not very deep) thinking was taking place at Monza in Italy, where the Grand Prix was scheduled for Sunday. Bernie Ecclestone of Formula One pronounced that the show must go on - but out of respect for the dead, Ferrari stripped all the logos off its cars and painted the nose cones black.
I’m not making this up, incidentally. Evidently, you see, it was the commercial aspect of motor-racing that would make its continuance offensive to people who needed time to absorb the significance of the attack on the World Trade Center, and to mourn the dead. ‘Ferrari has taken the decision to show that it shares a sense of grief with the American people, with whom it has always felt close ties,’ said a press release. ‘Therefore, this weekend, with the full agreement of its sponsors and partners, and as a mark of respect, its cars will carry no logos relating to its commercial or technical partners. For Ferrari and its partners, Sunday’s race will be a purely sporting event with no commercial implications, nor will it be a joyful event.’
To me, it was a bit easy, I admit. To me, it was cut and dried. Sport was not an essential part of life. It was supremely optional, a luxury of peacetime, and should know its place. Its own convenience should always take second place to real-world considerations - especially really big ones such as life and death. However, this wasn’t how things usually turned out in practice, as I knew full well. It is in sport’s interests to consider itself essential; one simple way it asserts its claim to immanence is by refusing to yield to any sort of interruption. This is a small example, I know, but I was once at a Saturday-afternoon Portsmouth-Sheffield United match at Fratton Park (a hell-hole; don’t go), when a referee’s assistant was struck to the ground by an incensed fan - and, to my utter astonishment, they didn’t stop the game. I can still picture the victim: this poor, stricken bloke lying there on his face on the pitch, not moving, still holding his flag, one leg straight, the other bent at the knee. It was very shocking. Was he dead? While his assailant was quickly caught by security men, his body continued to lie there, motionless. Whistles were blown and a stretcher brought to remove him from public gaze. It was horrible. Everything went quite quiet. And then the game quickly re-started, whistle, flag, off we go, free kick, play on, with a new chap standing in.
I was truly confused by this. I think I had already zipped up my coat, stamped some blood into my frozen feet, and fished the car key out of my pocket, so convinced was I that this game would be automatically abandoned. Isn’t there a rule that if you can’t play nicely, you can’t play at all? After something as serious as this, you surely don’t just suspend this match; you suspend football altogether until after the public inquiry. But it seemed the reverse was true. Pitch-side homicidal attack was precisely the kind of thing you don’t stop matches for. ‘If they stopped the football it would send out the wrong message,’ the seasoned chaps of the press box explained to me, wearily. ‘Then every time a fan wanted to sabotage a fixture, he’d just bludgeon an official. They went ahead with the game at Heysel, you know. They reckoned it would be worse for everyone if they didn’t play the match.’ A few minutes later, we heard that the linesman had recovered consciousness and was being taken to hospital, so that was all right, then; but I was very disturbed by it, and I still am. In the Monday paper, I banged on about it, but I got no sympathy or support from anywhere. I still wonder where you draw the line, though, if not at an absolute. What if the linesman had been shot in the head? What if the assailant had used a crossbow, and taken out a few rival supporters as well? Would they have stopped the match then? Or would that have sent out the wrong message, too?
Of course, it showed how little respect I had for football - that I expected everyone to interpret an outbreak of violence as a signal to stop what they were doing immediately, go home in silence, and think jolly hard afterwards about what had happened. And I suppose I ought to confess here that when, at the theatre once on a hot evening a couple of years later, a chap in the audience for The Postman Always Rings Twice had to be removed (and might have been dead), I did not even consider gathering my things to leave; instead I waited in some excitement for the resumption of the play, and was hugely impressed that Val Kilmer and the rest of the cast were able to pick up the action exactly where they had left off. Their self-possession was magnificent, and it earned them an enormous round of applause at the end. However, this is not a fully comparable situation. The man in the stalls had - as it turned out - merely fainted. But even if it had been more serious (as many feared), he had not been knocked unconscious in full view of everyone by a shaven-headed hooligan under the direct malign influence of the action on the stage.
Anyway, the bigger point is, when sport comes face to face with reality, it freaks out. When asked to adopt a sense of proportion (even temporarily), it runs around in circles as if its bum is on fire. In the week following 9/11, when sport came face to face with one of the biggest doses of reality of my lifetime, there was a great deal of anxious soul-searching from the people who write about it. Richard Williams in the Guardian summed it up nicely when he wrote that ‘those of us who earn our living from sport instinctively flinch from what feels like the sudden exposure of our essential frivolousness’. It seemed right for Radio 4’s Today to drop its usual three minutes of larky sports news - but, on the other hand, if you want to argue that sport has nothing to do with real life, logically it might as well have just carried on as normal. An editorial in the Observer argued that if the Ryder Cup were cancelled, sport would thereafter ‘always be considered expendable’ - clearly an unthinkable proposition. Meanwhile, less elevated arguments for cancellation were emerging from the golfers themselves. Some of the chaps said some wise things about the humble place of golf in the greater scheme of things; but some of them also made rather less impressive not-on-your-nellie noises about not wanting to put their own precious lives at risk by stepping aboard transatlantic aircraft. Leading the way, Tiger Woods said on his website:
I don’t believe this is a proper time to play competitive golf. I feel strongly that this is a time to pause, reflect and remember the victims of Tuesday’s horrific attack. I also fear that the security risks of travelling overseas at the present are too great.
Isn’t there a rather big step from ‘Golf is unimportant: let us sacrifice our games in full awareness of that fact,’ to ‘Golf is so important, oh my God, I might be a target just because I’m really good at it’? Yet several members of the American Ryder Cup team straddled both positions without apparent queasiness. The tall Alabaman Stewart Cink - a young man whose easy, loose-shouldered swing I am always pointing out to people as one of the most beautiful in the game (and it never works, because they conclude I just fancy him) - was the first golfer to be quoted as saying that the Ryder Cup might itself be targeted by terrorists. ‘If someone wanted to strike at America, or freedom, or capitalism, the Ryder Cup would be a tempting event to hit…I have a wife and two boys and do not want to make them live without a husband and without a father just because I want to play in the Ryder Cup.’
In the end, good sense prevailed, and the event was postponed for a year - but with the extraordinary proviso that the make-up of the teams would not be revised in the interim. What this was meant to prove I never understood (the form of some players dipped dramatically in the next 12 months; other up-and-coming chaps missed their chance to play), but this resolution not to change the teams was presented to us as golf’s small way of delivering one in the eye to Al-Qaeda, so nobody asked. At the opening ceremony at the Belfry a year later, on a cool green day in September 2002, both captains solemnly introduced their 2001 teams as if in tribute to 9/11. I suppose they could have painted their noses black as well, but fortunately there was no one around from Formula One to suggest it.
The Ryder Cup actually began its life with a disruption due to world events. It started, if you like, with a pause. The first organised meeting, scheduled for June 1926 at Wentworth in Surrey, is known as the ‘lost’ Ryder Cup because it fell foul of the General Strike and went off at half-cock. However, a year later, in 1927, the competition got going properly in Worcester, Massachusetts, and thereafter established a pattern of play that has lasted (so far) for more than eighty years, barring world wars and inconvenient terrorist atrocities. True, major things have changed in its constitution down the years - the size of the teams, the number of holes played, the number of points competed for, the number of days over which it takes place. Virtually every aspect of the competition has been adjusted over time, but it has now settled at:
Size of each team: 12, plus non-playing captain Number of holes played per match: 18 (it used to be 36) Number of points competed for: 28 (eight on each of the first two days; 12 on Sunday) Number of days: Three
The few key features of the Ryder Cup that have survived intact from its inception are:
It is played every two years.
The two pgas (Professional Golfers’ Associations) host it alternately.
It is matchplay (where each hole is won, lost or halved), as opposed to stroke play, where it’s the lowest overall shot total that wins.
It is an exciting mixture of paired games and single matches.
It starts with a dedication to the spirit of glorious sportsmanship, then quickly slips into complaint and/or recrimination, and finally ends up in muck, bullets, lifelong animosity, clubs broken across knees, and so on.
The biggest single change to the Ryder Cup’s constitution occurred in the 1970s. It was not before time, either.
Until 1977, you see, the us played a team from Great Britain and Ireland whose official blazer might just as well have sported a special crest with ‘Kick Me, Charlie’ emblazoned on it in Latin. I am generalising, obviously. There were periods of up and down. But in broad terms, an examination of the history of the Ryder Cup’s first half-century reveals the us team politely asking, every couple of years, ‘Hey! Sucker! Your place or mine?’ and then delivering a humiliating pasting of sickening proportions. The British and Irish traditionally limped away afterwards, vowed to try harder next time, and sulkily refused to accept that the contest was fundamentally unequal. After an 8-4 thrashing at Palm Springs in 1955, the president of the British pga came over all Churchillian, saying that ‘We are going back to practise in the streets and on the beaches.’ In 1961, a chap writing in Golf Illustrated said it was always the same at the Ryder Cup: the gb and Ireland players started off overwhelmed by the occasion, ‘and when they come to their senses their opponents are one or two holes to the good’. In 1967, at Houston, America’s captain, the great Ben Hogan, secured the outcome of the event even before a stroke was played. At the pre-match dinner he introduced his team with the words, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the finest golfers in the world!’ and the British and Irish were so demoralised that they gave up before even touching the soup.
Much as all this was good for the egos of American golfers, it did start to look a bit pointless after fifty years. Which is why, in time for the 1979 Ryder Cup at Greenbrier in West Virginia, years of common-sense campaigning by the competition-hungry Americans finally bore fruit and the Great Britain and Ireland team was extended to include Europe. This clever decision ultimately turned the Ryder Cup into what it is today: the third most popular sporting event in the world, after the football World Cup and the Olympics. Excellent mainland-Europe players such as Bernhard Langer (German), Jesper Parnevik (Swedish) and Sergio Garcia (Spanish) have played wonderfully in recent Ryder Cups. Back in 1979, however, the decision to extend the catchment area mainly meant that the charismatic young Spaniard Severiano Ballesteros could play against the Americans - although, sadly, at first the main benefit of Seve’s inclusion was that the European team could add the heartfelt groan of ‘Ay caramba’ to the usual ‘Oh fuck, not again’ when they lost convincingly by 17 points to 11.
We tend to think that Ryder Cup Sore Loser Syndrome is a modern phenomenon, incidentally, but we are wrong. The history of this competition is rigid with examples of losers complaining about the weather, the course, the type of grass, the crowds, and even the unfair superior skill of the opposing team. In 1947, when the British and Irish team were beaten in Portland, Oregon, by 11 points to 1 (the one point was scored in the very last match, too), captain Henry Cotton asked for the clubs of the opposition players to be inspected for illegally deep grooves, so convinced was he that the Americans’ success with backspin could not be down to talent alone. Ten years later, at Lindrick (near Sheffield), the Americans suffered a rare defeat and complained about the biased Yorkshire crowds, and three of the team were so pissed off they refused to attend the prize-giving. ‘They cheered when I missed a putt and sat on their hands when I hit a good shot,’ whined Tommy (‘Lightning’) Bolt. In his frustration at losing by 4 and 3 to Eric Brown in the singles, Bolt broke a club across his knee. He told Brown that he hadn’t enjoyed their match at all, to which the sportsmanly Brown is said to have replied, ‘No, neither would I if I had been given the hiding I just gave you!’
In the decades prior to the Big Ryder Cup Post 9/11 Dither of September 2001, the supposed friendliness of the contest had been stretched to breaking point on several occasions. This was, I’m sure, one of the factors in the decision to postpone. What no one could face (although of course no one admitted it) was the idea of either:
The thing is, since the mid-1980s, the Americans had been granted their wish: the contest had evened up, and they had found themselves the affronted losers on several occasions. In 1987, at Muirfield Village in Columbus, Ohio, they lost, narrowly, on home soil - moreover on a course that their captain, Jack Nicklaus, had himself designed. This sort of setback had tested their sportsmanship, and what a surprise, light-heartedness in defeat turned out not to be their best talent - just as Europe’s has never been grace in victory, when it comes to that. ‘We just love the Ryder Cup!’ the Americans have continued to profess, but the teeth are now quite likely to be gritted when they say it. On each occasion I have attended the Ryder Cup (since 1997), the Europeans have lined up at the opening ceremony with beaming smiles, as if for a group birthday outing, while the Americans in their preppy blazers have looked tense, formal and grim - not to mention also pale of brow and oddly peanut-headed without their usual baseball caps.
It is unfair, though, to expect the golfers to get the balance right. The correct balance has, arguably, never been struck in the history of the fixture. Everyone who cheerfully wants the Ryder Cup to be a substitute for warfare still reserves the right to say, wagging a finger, ‘Now, high spirits are all very well; but don’t forget golf is a civilised game for civilised people.’ I think this may explain why Tiger Woods - who diplomatically claims to adore the Ryder Cup - clearly suffers like a martyr on a gridiron every time he’s forced to play it. I think his nature rebels. Golf, for him, is about winning by being the best. If he’d wanted to play team sports for a living, for heaven’s sake, would he have chosen golf ? It is often said that the current top American players are less good at bonding as a team than the more lowly-ranked Europeans, and this is sometimes blamed for their recent lack of success in the Ryder Cup. Are they maybe a bit spoiled? Are they too rich? Are they too entouraged ? Well, it may simply be they are too good. It is completely understandable that a successful golfer should have difficulties taking one for the team, or enjoying a group hug. Golf is not a contact sport. It is, in fact, an anti-contact sport. As we have seen in the previous chapter, it is an ostensibly sociable game that in reality attracts people who are secretly (or not so secretly) misanthropic bastards.
Lovers of the Ryder Cup tradition are quick to remember moments of sportsmanship - as, for example, when golfers on the winning side have conceded missable putts, to take the pressure off of an opponent. In 1969, at Royal Birkdale, Jack Nicklaus famously picked up Tony Jacklin’s marker, three feet from the hole on the 18th, and said, ‘I don’t think you would have missed that putt, but in the circumstances I would never give you the opportunity.’ The result of Nicklaus’s historic gesture was a 16-16 draw - although this wasn’t quite as noble as it sounds, since the rules state that the defending team retains the Cup in the event of a dead heat. But how terrific of him, and what a great way to put it - ‘I would never give you the opportunity’. This lovely story makes me think of the shiver-up-the-spine moment at the end of the movie Batman Begins, when Lieutenant Gordon says to Batman, ‘I never said thank you,’ and Batman replies, ‘And you’ll never have to’ - before spreading his cape and diving off a parapet to swoop into the night.
However, such superhero moments are rare in the history of this competition, and in recent times there has been a lot of head-shaking about the Ryder Cup getting too bellicose, especially after the meetings in America in 1991 and 1999. Taking place against a background of global conflict, the 1991 Ryder Cup was played at Kiawah Island in South Carolina, where the us team got so infected with Desert Storm patriotic fervour that the press dubbed the event ‘The War on the Shore’. In 1991, the us hadn’t won the Cup for eight years, and were pretty sore about it - but still, how they managed to confuse golf against Europe with bombing Iraq was never adequately explained. There was an unprecedented unpleasantness about Kiawah Island, which the Americans finally won by 141/2 to 131/2, the whole result turning on a single missed putt by Bernhard Langer, the horror of which has arguably marked the poor chap for life. Corey Pavin and other us players wore Desert Storm caps. Galleries whooped, bellowed and screamed. The Europeans were subjected to insults, offensive prank calls, spectators chucking decoy balls onto the course, and even a daft campaign (started by a local radio station) to deprive them of sleep by yelling outside their hotel in the small hours. After the victory, us player Paul Azinger said: ‘American pride is back. We went over there and thumped the Iraqis. Now we’ve taken the Cup back. I’m proud to be an American.’
I wasn’t there in 1991, but I have a vivid memory of the Sunday afternoon eight years later, at Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1999. It was a famous day, for one reason and another. The Americans had finished the Saturday four points down, which meant that, to win the Cup, they needed at least 81/2 points from the 12 available in the singles matches - which, frankly, looked like a tall order. No winning team had ever started the Sunday with more than a two-point deficit before. We Europeans were culpably light-hearted about how well things had gone for us in the preceding two days; we had celebrated tactlessly (there was even, I’m ashamed to say, cheering in the press restaurant); we were fools not to register the intensity of the anger and wounded pride now pulsing through our opponents. La la la, we trilled. Hey ho, lighten up you guys, it’s just a game, but aren’t we good at it, la la la la la, New England in the Fall, what could be nicer, la la la la la? Imagine a blithe little lamb with a ribbon round its neck skipping about in front of a wounded and starving lioness, and you get the idea. I always remember our collective euphoria in watching the 19-year-old Sergio Garcia paired with Jesper Parnevik on those first two days: in the four matches they had played together, first they had beaten Tom Lehman and Tiger Woods, then they had beaten Phil Mickelson and Jim Furyk, then they had beaten Payne Stewart and Justin Leonard, and then they had halved against David Duval and Davis Love iii. Bloody hell. Could this really be happening? They larked about together, Sergio and Jesper. They hugged and high-fived. They jumped into each other’s arms. Can you imagine how obnoxious this behaviour must have been to their opponents? At what temperature, I wonder, does human blood literally start to boil?
All week the Europeans had infuriated their hosts by appearing to take the contest lightly, their captain Mark James setting the tone by being hilariously flippant in his public statements - in contrast to the deep, full-fathom-five solemnity of the us captain, Ben Crenshaw, who said things were ‘very, very meaningful’, and that Sergio Garcia had a ‘very, very wide arsenal’ (scary moment there, actually). James’s press conferences were completely disarming. He said the thing he feared most about the Americans was their dress sense. It was like watching a person repeatedly cheeking a humourless us immigration officer, and getting away with it. ‘What was your best decision today as captain?’ James would be asked, and he’d say, ‘I had the hamburger for lunch instead of the turkey sandwich, and I really enjoyed it.’ Asked why he parked his captain’s buggy at a particular place on the course, he said he usually chose a spot where he could catch a bit of sun. ‘Tell us about Miguel Angel Jimenez,’ a reporter pleaded. ‘Well, I don’t know a huge amount about him,’ said James. ‘He’s got a Ferrari.’
Boy, were we asking for it. And boy, did we get it. On the Saturday night, according to legend, Ben Crenshaw invited George W. Bush, then governor of Texas, to fire up his men by reading to them a stirring appeal-for-help letter written at the Alamo. The next morning the us team arrived on the course pumped up to a frenzy of battle resolve, and incidentally wearing the ugliest shirts you’ve ever seen. It was shock and awe time again, basically - and before the happy little European lamb could say ‘Baa?’, it was torn to pieces, reduced to nothing more than an interesting spatter pattern, a stump of woolly hoof, and a poignant strip of ripped and bloody ribbon caught up on a bit of shrub. In the first six singles matches, the us players absolutely slaughtered us, and the crowd got the taste for blood. One by one, the Europeans were simply blown away. In the end, only four of our boys were able to make a game of it on that Sunday - Padraig Harrington, José-Maria Olazabal, Colin Montgomerie and Paul Lawrie - but no one has ever accused the Europeans of choking. On the contrary, those who scored points against the Americans are regarded as heroes. The crowd was so appallingly abusive to Colin Montgomerie that his dad left the course in disgust. Mark James’s wife was spat at. All day the crowds just shouted at the Europeans to go home.
Personally, I was exposed to only about an hour of this. Given the deadline difficulties of filing copy from America to London (the first deadline is around 1.30 p.m., and the last is around six), it was necessary to spend most of the Sunday working in the air-conditioned press tent, watching the singles matches unfold on TV screens, and updating pieces for each edition. However, at last spotting a gap between deadlines, I walked out to the nearest point of the course in time to see Colin Montgomerie and Payne Stewart come by, and it was one of the most shocking discontinuities I’ve ever experienced. Passing from the TV version of the event to the reality was like walking out of the Reading Room of the British Museum and into the trenches of the First World War. It was unnaturally dark out there, for a start. The atmosphere was almost unbreathably thick; people were yelling abuse; there was an air of violence. As someone who had spent three years mingling with football crowds, I was no stranger to this sort of thing. But I had never felt it on a golf course before, and I hope I never will again.
This was all prior to the events on the 17th hole - events which every person considering what to do about the Ryder Cup in 2001 must have had in mind, even if they didn’t say so. Having already secured eight of the required eight and a half points, a number of excited American players were gathered at the 17th green to cheer Justin Leonard in his match against José-Maria Olazabal. Olazabal had been four up earlier in the match, but Leonard had putted beautifully, making birdies, and had eroded Olazabal’s lead until they were all square after 16. If Leonard won the 17th, he would ensure a half-point for his team, and therefore victory. If he halved it, he still stood the chance of winning (or losing) the match on the 18th. Arriving at the green, Olazabal had a twenty-foot putt for birdie; Leonard was putting from around forty-five feet, also for birdie. With one of those shots that ring around the world, Leonard made that brilliant putt, with the result that his team-mates, whooping and shrieking, charged onto the green in triumph. They knew Leonard hadn’t won the hole yet, but they went berserk anyway, and the pictures of that mad moment became instantly iconic: the American players and caddies surging, leaping onto the green in the foreground; an impassive Olazabal in the distance, head bowed, presumably battling to contain his feelings (as I suspect he always is). This was the moment when all that guff about golf being a gentlemanly sport simply went up in smoke.
Now, the Americans had had a fantastic day. Despite the considerable hindrance of the hideous shirts, they had played magnificently. They had staged the biggest fight-back in the history of the competition. But the fact that they ran out onto the green at the 17th before Olazabal had had a chance to putt was, in golf terms, a heinous sin, and unforgivable. Had Olazabal halved the hole, and gone on to win the 18th (and as it happens, Olazabal did win the 18th), he would have prevented - or at least delayed - the us win. Given that the eventual score was 141/2 to 131/2 (and Europe needed only 14 points to retain the Cup), Olazabal’s putt was just as crucial as Leonard’s had been.
But he not only had to wait for the celebrations to die down; the crowd then yelled abuse at him. Nowadays, as part of the generous campaign to forget Brookline and not point the finger at anyone (because it just makes the us players defensive, and doesn’t achieve anything), Olazabal is often quoted as saying, in a saintly way, that had the boot been on the other foot, who knows whether the Europeans would have behaved similarly. At the time, however, that was not what he said. At the press conference afterwards, he congratulated the Americans but said that ‘What happened today should not have happened. We are playing a match and we should show respect to each other and what happened was not the right thing to do.’
When people refer darkly to the events at Brookline in 1999, this is what they are talking about. When the pgas tore their raiments in agony in September 2001, deciding whether or not to postpone, they knew that the event under consideration was more than just a straightforward golfing competition, it was potentially a bloodbath. Those events on the 17th at Brookline had shown us what happens when you mix golf with war, start meaning it, and leave yourself with no way to get back. On both sides the memory was fresh, and people were still very sore about it. It no longer cut much ice to console oneself with, ‘Yes, but Jack Nicklaus did say that fantastic thing to Tony Jacklin back in 1969.’ It is a harsh thing to say, but postponing the competition by a year and then playing it in the shadow of a terrorist atrocity was, as it turned out, precisely what was required. It lent a bit of perspective. I’ve never heard anyone say this, but perhaps the horrific events of 9/11 were responsible, in an ill-wind kind of way, for saving the Ryder Cup.
My main memory of the 2002 Ryder Cup at the Belfry is of being in the wrong place at the wrong time - so no change there, then, I hear you say. But it’s the chief reality of on-the-spot golf-writing that there is no optimum place from which to view an unfolding golf tournament, except in front of a telly, listening to Peter Alliss sending private warm wishes over the public airwaves to the party with fairy cakes going on today for the 90th birthday of the expro Sandy MacHoots at the Old-Bastard-on-the-Wold Golf Club. (I do wish he’d stop doing that.) If you opt to follow a match for 18 holes - which involves walking several miles, crouching motionless in the long grass when required to, and jotting down umpteen yardages and club selections - you must do it in full knowledge that in terms of getting a useable story you probably might just as well have stayed at home and groomed the cat. The story of the day will arise wherever it chooses to, and is impossible to secondguess. On the Sunday at the Belfry in 2002, I was assigned to the match between Lee Westwood and Scott Verplank, which looked all right on paper, but turned out to be an odd, dreamlike affair, with no story in it for anyone concerned. Basically, Westwood didn’t look like winning, by contrast to most of his team-mates, who were blazing a trail towards an eventual victory of 151/2 points to 121/2. He won a hole here; lost a hole there. Elsewhere on the course - as tantalising distant roars frequently attested - all was going fabulously well for Europe, and I was very glad just to hear about it on Radio 5 as I plodded round regardless. The virtually unknown Philip Price was beating Phil Mickelson. Jesper Parnevik was heading for a half with Tiger Woods. Padraig Harrington was slaughtering Mark Calcavecchia.
As always in these circumstances, I used no journalistic initiative. I stuck with Lee. Where a better journalist assigned to this match would have dashed off to get a better story (and all the rest of them did), I didn’t have the heart. And to be honest, it has now become almost a point of pride for me to pick a naff match on the Sunday of the Ryder Cup. At Valderrama in 1997 I went out with Ian Woosnam, who lost to Fred Couples by one of the most horrific margins ever - 8 and 7. In 2002, I got Westwood. And in 2006, at the K Club in Dublin, in a drenching downpour, I was allotted Sergio Garcia, who immediately started losing so catastrophically to Stewart Cink (five down after seven holes) that John Hopkins - knowing from experience how stolid I can be in such circumstances - came out to intercept me after the front nine, pulling me out of the squelching mud, and officially taking me off this awful non-story. I wouldn’t have minded, but the bloody rain stopped the moment I went indoors. Anyway, at Louisville, Kentucky (2008), the pattern was finally broken. Noticing my jinx effect, perhaps, my bosses begged me to keep away from the players altogether on the Sunday, so I stayed in the tent with all my outdoor paraphernalia piled untidily around my desk, and wrote about the very real mental agony of having to revise my prejudices concerning Ian Poulter (still a bit of a git, but incontrovertibly the most impressive player on the European team).
I missed going out, of course. One of the reasons I love covering golf is that you get to walk round with the players. I mean, you don’t chat with them or anything. You don’t say, ‘I’d aim for that TV tower if I were you,’ or ‘I was surprised you chose the wedge.’ Your presence is something they blank out, which is fair enough. I did once help David Duval look for his ball in some gorse, but I’m pretty sure I was invisible throughout, and I kept my distance anyway on account of that awful gobbing. Generally you stay near to the ropes, and you have to kneel or crouch when the shots are taken, so the spectators can see over your head. It is no stroll, however. Ambling is not an option. While the golfers stride down rolling velvety fairways, we hacks have to scramble over tussocks of long grass and occasionally slip and fall over (to cheers from the crowd). The marshals who control the crossings will often wait for the players to pass and then, just as we approach (yelling ‘Wait for us!’), they open the ropes, so we have to fight our way through crowds of spectators, streaming from one side of the fairway to the other. We are often a fairly merry band, however. We have a laugh. ‘Ten foot putt?’ we say, peering towards the green. ‘Twelve,’ says someone. ‘Fifteen,’ says another. I am usually listening to the radio commentary, so I tend to pass on what the commentator has said (‘He says eight’), so we can all agree a number. My own method of calculating distance on the green is to imagine laying a number of six-foot golfers end to end, but I wouldn’t dare mention this to the guys, obviously, because of the scope for innuendo.
Notepad and pen are all that the guys carry, by the way, and I can’t imagine how they do it. I am permanently in awe at their sheer chutzpah in the face of four or five hours in the unpredictable outdoors. They just strap on an armband with ‘press’ on it, click a Biro, and out they go. By contrast, every time I go out on the golf course, I not only change into a completely different outfit (golf shoes with soft cleats, waterproof jacket, jumbo waterproof trousers), but I pack into a knapsack enough wardrobe options and essential survival items for a weekend on Dartmoor. While the chaps merely pay attention to the golf and jot down the occasional note (some of them pretend they can even follow the flight of the ball, but I don’t believe them), I am forever re-arranging my possessions: passing from hand to hand any combination of gloves, hat, glasses, binoculars, sun cream, radio, switched-off mobile phone, purse, wallet, allergy tablets, yardage guide, spare batteries, jumper, novel, spare glasses, back-up radio, tin of mints, tissues, sunglasses, sanitary towels, contact lenses (in case I lose all the glasses), bottle of water, glucose tablets, banana, firstaid kit, set of splints, fold-away stretcher, portable resuscitation unit and emergency distress flares. No wonder I never know what’s going on. No wonder I can never find my bloody notepad and my bloody pen. What is interesting is how the chaps are tactful enough never to comment on all this stuff I’m freighting about, but at the same time they won’t have anything to do with it, either. If a chap sneezes and I say, ‘Ooh, I’ve got a big box of tissues in here somewhere,’ I’ve noticed the offer is always declined quite sharply. If a chap is in visible need of a sustaining banana, I have equally learned not to say anything about having a spare apple and an individual fruit pie if they’re interested. It appears to be a male-pride thing, and I am bound to respect it, even without understanding it. Some men just don’t like to be offered things, do they? And they would rather die than ask. Mind you, I think my fellow golf writers are mainly worried I’ll one day magically produce a fully-erect hat-stand out of that bag of mine, like Mary Poppins. I’m actually quite worried about that myself.
Back at the 2002 Ryder Cup at the Belfry on the Sunday, of course, there was no one to offer a fruit pie to besides Lee Westwood himself, because the smarter blokes had so wisely buggered off elsewhere. On the first two days, Westwood’s current supposed lack of form (he was ranked 148 in the world, having sunk dramatically since the team was fixed in 2001) had seemed a mere irrelevance. He and Sergio Garcia had played in all four sessions, and won three points - despite some rather costly juvenile heroics on the 10th. But now, on singles day, the miracle had been revoked, and the fact that Westwood managed to hang on to Verplank until the 17th was a huge achievement. He made a terrific birdie putt at the fourth (my notes say it was 30 feet, but I suspect I was mentally laying five golfers end to end again here, so this may not be a reliable figure). On the eighth, he did it again. But you just knew that, whatever he did, this stuff wasn’t going to make it onto the telly. Out on the leafy, autumnal course with only his wife in support, and only one journalist (me) still taking an interest, Westwood v Verplank was the remotest edge of the action. I kept wondering, ‘Should I go off and follow someone else? Where did all the guys go? Oh no, was it all my fault for offering that cheese board at the eighth? Oh come on, it was only a bit of brie and a few Bath Olivers!’
But on the other hand, I couldn’t just leave Westwood now, could I? It would look so rude. I remember how Lee’s wife vented her feelings when captain Sam Torrance and team-mate Padraig Harrington eventually showed up in support on the 15th. ‘Finally, we get some help,’ she said. ‘Hear, hear,’ I echoed, quietly.
There was an air of ‘finally’ about the whole Ryder Cup that year. Everyone was glad to get the damn thing played at last - and to move on to a new era in which no War on the Shore and no Brookline Outrage could occur again in our lifetimes. Postponing by a year put the events of 9/11 at a distance, but its true value was in shifting Brookline further into the past. Sadly, as it happens, history repeated itself at the first opportunity. Europe won again in 2004 and 2006. In 2006, in fact, someone at a press conference at the K Club in Dublin dared to suggest to the losing American captain Tom Lehman that, with the contest getting so one-sided these days, maybe it was time to change the rules again: maybe the US team should be opened up to include players from other parts of the world, just in the interests of making the contest more even? Lehman said that the question was ‘a little insulting in some ways’, by which he meant it was very offensive. He said there were cycles in these things, and that the American golf world was full of great players.
But while his team lost with exemplary good grace - taking turns to hug the recently widowed Darren Clarke, for example, and talking a lot about respect - the effect was ever so slightly creepy, and those of us with a sense of history knew where this three-losses-on-the-trot thing would ultimately lead, and so it did. In September 2008, Europe was duly trounced at the Valhalla course in Louisville, Kentucky - with lots of unlovely crowd behaviour - and honour was restored.