Olé, Olé, Olé: The Ryder Cup is British

The Ryder Cup is arguably the greatest team sports event in the world. Even the non-sports fan can be enthralled by the sheer tension that it creates. But the Ryder Cup is also one of the strangest team sports events. It throws together sportsmen who normally engage in the most individual of sports, and in the case of the European team, golfers who are not required to have a common national background but who represent one of the major power blocks in the sport - the European golf tour.

International sport, as in sporting events between different nations, supplies its own inherent tension simply because of a nationalistic ingredient. Combining nations should, in theory, lessen both the nationalism and therefore the tension, but when it comes to the Ryder Cup it doesn't. Nationalism is cast aside in favour of supra-nationalism, that of Europe, and for once an Englishman can be proud of a German.

For all this, just how European is the Ryder Cup? The roots of the competition - Britain versus the US then briefly (and officially) Britain and Ireland versus the US before the Europeans got involved - are still very evident. Britain supplied seven of the 2012 team but more importantly, it is Britain where the real interest in the competition lies.

The temporary acquisition of supra-nationalism by the British sports fan is really little more than British nationalism with a twist. Within all the feedback and comments that surfaced on the social media during Europe's astonishing comeback at Medinah were constant references along the lines of the icing on the cake for a great summer of British sport. Not European, British. The Ryder Cup was placed alongside the Olympics, Wiggins and Murray.

The supporters who had travelled to the US adopted the pan-European chant of "olé, olé, olé". While this might have been taken as a nod in the direction of the team captain, José María Olazabal, it was more a case of the football terraces having supplied a ready-made song for all to join in and to understand. "Olé, olé, olé" is a sort of universal sports-speak, one that has been adopted by cricket's Barmy Army and by others with no obvious Spanish origins. The singing of "You'll Never Walk Alone" has also become more global, but its roots are very obvious; it was one of the songs of the European supporters.

It is when one considers media coverage that the picture of where the real interest lies is revealed. The Spanish clearly had an interest in this year's competition in that the captain was Spanish, Garcia was on the team and the inspiration was the memory of Severiano Ballesteros. The event itself though was almost secondary to Seve.

Of four news websites on Monday morning, one carried no mention at all of the Ryder Cup, another managed to put a report in its football section, one did at least place the victory on its home page (with suitable reference to Seve) and another carried a report under "more sports". The national obsession with Barcelona and Real Madrid was of greater significance. One other website, that for the sports newspaper "Marca", did do the event justice, but then it is a sports publication. Compare this coverage with, for example, "The Guardian". I typed Ryder Cup into the paper's search engine and 366 articles came up. I gave up after ten pages, but they were all related to the 2012 event.

For the Spanish, much though there was meaning because of Seve's memory, there wasn't anything like the level of interest as in Britain. And even the Seve memory angle was as important to the non-Spaniard as it was to the Spaniard; more so perhaps. Ballesteros was never lauded as much in his own country as he was outside it, especially in Britain. Olé, olé, olé; it was the emergence of Seve (and others) that was to prove crucial to the success that Europe now has at the Ryder Cup. Without it, there might never have been the change to a European team rather than a British (and Irish) team which was ritually humiliated every two years by superior American golfers.

Of non-British players on the European team, Colsaerts is a virtual unknown in his own country, Kaymer is not big news in Germany. In Britain, though, McIlroy is a superstar. Westwood, Donald and McDowell may not be but they are still well-known. There is a sense in which the non-British players become honorary Brits for three days of golf. To many British sports fans, they do, as Medinah capped a great year for British sport. Apparently.

N.B. In order to pre-empt the pedants, I do of course recognise that McIlroy and McDowell being British is a question of definition.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Ryder White Swan

All sports are, at a basic level, absurdly simple. Football - bloke kicks ball into net. Cricket - bloke hits ball with a bit of wood or bloke hits bits of wood with ball. Golf - bloke hits ball with a stick into a hole. They cease to be simple when they become tangled up with jargon, statistics, strategies, tactics and, with some, the sheer length of time they take. Someone once had the bright idea for golf that rather than a bloke hitting his ball with a stick into one hole, or five or seven or eleven, he should do it eighteen times. In the process, he came up with the most tedious sports spectacle known to man.

My resentment of watching golf is based largely on having once been abandoned on Sunningdale's course by my father and his mates who had escaped to the beer tent while I was left to get soaked to the skin following a player who may or may not have been Tony Jacklin; it was hard to tell through the rain. It was a short and irrational pitch from the misery of a drenching to a lifelong condemnation of golf-spectating as mind-numblingly dull.

Except when it comes to the Ryder Cup. It has entirely to do with team sports. There's something in that CV stuff you get presented with and the modern mantra of finding "team players". You simply file in the bin anyone who under interests and activities lists chess (mad), boxing (mad with violent tendencies) or golf (mad with an obsessive disorder). No, you look for those who will willingly hurl themselves against an eighteen-stone lock forward as evidence of common sense and the placing of the team before their own mortality. In the same way, you look for a team event to ignite the passions of collective spectator identification and involvement.

It's only when golf does team play that it becomes interesting. Not just interesting, but also unbearably exciting and tense. Which is the Ryder Cup all over. And no more so than when McDowell was coming down the seventeenth.

But what is it about the Ryder Cup? The team, after all, is an amalgamation of individuals from different countries, an all-star twelve engaged in what Rory McIlroy had described as an exhibition. Yet a patriotic spirit rises to the surface, one which makes it possible to be supportive of a totally useless German for heaven's sake. Maybe it's all to do with putting one over the Yanks and their full metal jacket whooping.

For all this though, the Ryder Cup is not like football. Does it pack the bars of Mallorca - the Swans, the White Roses - with face-painted, flag-waving, replica-shirt wearing "Europeans"? For starters, what flag are you supposed to wave? What shirts are you supposed to wear? Who really wants to go around pretending they're Miguel Angel Jimenez by having his name on their back in the way they would a Rooney or Gerrard? The odd Spaniard perhaps, celebrating the fact that golf can permit a cigar-chomping vision of non-health and efficiency in the way that only golf can - think such porkers as John Daly and Craig Stadler. But otherwise the local sports shops aren't suddenly going to stock up with juniors' and seniors' Westwood or Fisher shirts.

Then there's the singing. "YOU-ROPE, YOU-ROPE." No one can do it with conviction because no one is really sure what they're supporting. It's a false identification that hides the temporarily submerged nationalism of an "inger-land, inger-land". Do you get groups of lagered-up lads in the bars giving it large with a Europe chant? Because golf takes so damn long and thus goes way beyond the average tourist's 90-minute attention span, do you get anyone bothering to spend several hours in a bar when there is something else to do - like sitting around the pool?

The answer is - remarkably - that you do. The bars do get taken over. Why? Because the Ryder Cup is one of the most remarkable sporting contests known to man. It totally transcends the tedium of a normal golf event, it does indeed have the power to mould an unlikely European nationalism. And it comes down to the fact that sport is very simple. Not just in how it's played, but in the fact that one team wins and one team loses. And guess which team won.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.