Hey! An Actual Golf Piece...From The Golf Room. Get It?

When the Ryder Cup comes around, I always like to remind people that the United States (US) was beating Great Britain and Ireland (GB&I) so badly, for so long, that it stopped being fun. A little golf history for the uninitiated. The Ryder Cup, for decades, was a golf match between the US and GB&I that was played every two years. At first, the Ryder Cup was a fair fight. The US won the first edition in 1927, GB&I the second, the U.S. won the third, and GB&I took the fourth. The US won two more before being suspended because of World War II. When the matches resumed, things kind of went off the rails. From 1947 through 1977, the US won every Ryder Cup except two (and one of those was a tie, so the US retained the cup). That’s right, kids…13-1-1. It’s what we like to call, “Domination, homes!”

That domination started to become boring; especially for television. So the PGA Tour and it’s European equivalent did what sports’ governing bodies do when things get boring; they tweaked the rules. In 1979, the GB&I team became the European team. Two Spaniards, Seve Ballesteros and Antonio Garrido, joined the team, and the US couldn’t compete with that. Just kidding! The US won that Ryder Cup as well, and then added two more for good measure.

It wasn't until 1985 that Europe finally won and made it a real competition. Since the 1979 expansion, Europe has 12 wins, 9 losses, and 1 tie. The expansion gave Europe a huge demographic advantage. The talent pool was no longer limited to a couple of small islands against an industrial, continent-wide powerhouse. Europe today has roughly 750 million people, depending on how you define “Europe”—that's over twice as many as America's 340 million people. 

The US however, has wealth on its side. Only a few relatively small European countries have a higher GDP per capita than the US—almost $89,000—and golf is not a poor man's game. For somebody like me, it was a lot cheaper to just grab my sneakers, throw on a ratty old t-shirt, grab a basketball, and head up to Twin Oaks for a summer night of hoops. Hell, even a membership at the local YMCA, and new Chuck Taylor’s every few weeks was cab fare compared to what I now spend on all things golf. And getting really good at golf means expensive lessons; becoming elite costs even more.

Thus, the stage is set for a massive duel between teams representing a few hundred million freedom-loving capitalists against several hundred million more tax-loving squashers of free speech. Reducing it to population and wealth is a bit of an oversimplification (the Americans dominate the non-European team in the Presidents Cup despite a massive population gap), but that, coupled with a strong golf culture, can probably explain a lot. 

While the Ryder Cup has recently had its flirtations with boorish behavior by fans, and even worse behavior by the participants (the times live in, I suppose), it is still, I believe, the closest we are going to get to civility, and adults being adults in the sporting arena. That hope will be sorely tested by the thousands upon thousands of New Yorkers who will gather at Bethpage State Park Golf Club just outside New York City, this weekend. But hope springs eternal, doesn’t it? Or, should I say, “Decorum be damned!”

So tune in starting tomorrow (Friday) through Sunday. Watch some great golf; root for the red, white, and blue; and see if you can count to 20 before the first New Yorker throws decorum out the window and body-slams a European fan to the turf! The betting windows are open!!

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com