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.