Discover more from REACTION
There was much talk of team spirit, and doubtless the Europeans were a happier band of brothers than the Americans, partly perhaps because, all the individuals having been assessed, there was a general view that the Americans were favourites, and so there may have been just a little less pressure on the Europeans. All the same, it’s easy to make too much of this. The winning team in any sport will usually seem to have bonded better. We have, after all, been told that two years ago at Hazeltine where they won, the Americans had discovered the secret of togetherness. After the match of course, there are few grumbles from the winners, while the defeated may give way to criticism and recriminations, as Phil Mickelson did four years ago at Gleneagles when moaning about his captain, Tom Watson.
This time it was Patrick Reed, the reigning Masters champion, who gave tongue, complaining that Jordan Spieth, with whom he had formed an effective partnership in the last two Ryder Cups, hadn’t wanted to play with him this time. Then he criticised his captain, Jim Furyk, for leaving him out of two sessions. Considering how badly he played on the first morning, spraying shots in all directions but the right one, I reckoned he was lucky not to have been told to wait till Sunday’s Singles before playing again. What’s more, if one of your team-mates makes it clear he doesn’t want to partner you, it might be wiser to keep silent and to ask yourself a few questions.
In contrast everything was happiness, hugs and kisses all round in the European camp when the match was won. No surprise there. No doubt many of them are indeed good friends, and have been for years but there is one reason why this victory was so very satisfying. Every player on the European team contributed. So often there is at least one whose delight in his team’s victory is inevitably tempered by the awareness that he didn’t score even a half-point himself. After he and Tommy Fleetwood had won Europe’s only match on Friday morning’s Fourballs, this year’s star, Francesco Molinari’s first word to his interviewer was “Finally”. He had played in two previous Cups and won nothing.
Match-play, as I’ve written here before, is the best form of golf, but this doesn’t always mean that a player who had won has always played better than a team-mate who has lost. In match-play you have two opponents but the first one is still the course. You can struggle to come to terms with the course, but still win your match if your opponent is even more at odds with the course. The converse is equally true: you can master the course and still lose to an opponent who has mastered it more completely. Nobody ever said golf was meant to be fair. Such things should be considered when assessing performance. Much has been made, for instance, of Tiger Woods’ failure to score any points for the USA. Few that I’ve seen have remarked that in his two Fourballs and one Foursome he came up against Europe’s star pairing of Molinari and Fleetwood.
One of the beauties of match-play is that you can have a couple of rotten holes that would set your score soaring and knock you out of contention in a stroke play tournament, and you have lost only two holes which you can still hope to win back. All the same it’s most often the case that matches are won by the player or pair who make fewer mistakes, drop fewer shots.
The Americans may have been guilty of over-confidence. Everyone knew that Le Golf National is a testing course and very different from most of the wide-open, rough-free courses on which so many US Tour events are played. But when the French Open Championship was played there at the end of June, Justin Thomas was the only member of the American Ryder Cup team to take the chance to play a tournament there. He finished 8th, alongside Sergio Garcia, and he would go on to be the most successful American last weekend. In contrast seven of the European team chose to play in the French Open. One, Alex Noren, won it. Two of them, Tommy Fleetwood and Thorbjorn Olesen, failed to make the cut, but they would at least have learned something about the problems the course poses. The evidence of last weekend suggests they learned the lesson satisfactorily.
Golfers can have long careers – even if you discount the Old Folks Tour for which they become eligible when they turn fifty. Sergio Garcia, perhaps the happiest of Thomas Bjorn’s picks (if only because he was the most criticized) played in his first Ryder Cup as long ago as 1999, and now, having overtaken Nick Faldo as Europe’s top points-scorer, isn’t yet forty, and may have a couple more Ryder Cups to play yet. But a number of this European team are either side of the 40 mark – Henrik Stenson, Ian Poulter, Paul Casey and Justin Rose as well as Sergio. On the American side this will surely have been Mickelson’s last Ryder Cup, probably the last for Tiger Woods also. But at least half a dozen of this American team will be looking for revenge in 2020, Patrick Reed among them, assuming he can find someone happy to partner him in a foursome…
I came on a website piece dating from sometime last year, in which the author declared that the Ryder Cup was more or less done for because interest was going to fade away. Why? Well, first, the USA had learned their lesson after the failure at Gleneagles. They had got their act together and given the Europeans a sound drubbing at Hezeltine in 2016. Moreover there were all these great Americans still in their twenties while European stars were either fading and younger ones, with the exception of Rory McIlroy, would never be more than starlets. It was anyway the case that the USA, if properly organized, should always win, because the US tour was so much better and richer than the European one. Accordingly we were about to enter on a long period of American dominance. The event would become so predictable and one-sided that nobody would care much about it. Sad, really, he seemed to suggest. It was good fun when it was a real contest. But these days were over… So that’s how it was going to be, and then the Americans arrived at Le Golf National.
Ah well, there can’t be many sportswriters who haven’t sometimes made a fool of themselves. Indeed, we do this even more often than political commentators. Remember how many of them in the Thatcher years used to say there would never be another Labour Government – often actually the same chaps who assured us when Tony Blair was in Downing Street that we’d never see another Tory PM?
Still, I enjoyed this piece, and the author’s listing of “the rock-star core” the USA would have for the next decade and more.
Aye Right. The only player at Le Golf National who could have been mistaken for a rock-star was Tommy Fleetwood.
Subscribe to REACTION
Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.