September 30 - October 7, 1999
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Easy Ryder
Golf's biggest rage comes to Brookline, enthralling a skyscraper's worth of plutocrats and -- surprise! -- the rest of us, too
by Jason Gay
If the United States team hadn't unleashed a street-corner-style ass-kicking in Brookline Sunday to beat Europe and win the Ryder Cup, the most memorable part of the three-day golf tournament wouldn't have been Justin Leonard's majestic 45-foot putt on the 17th hole, which sealed the improbable American comeback and caused a bunch of pampered professionals to celebrate like Little Leaguers. It would have been the money. It would have been the million-dollar athletes, the billion-dollar corporations, the $275 tickets, and the $12 commemorative mousepads. It would have been the $500,000 tents, the $28 ball caps, and the $590 Escada Sport Ryder Cup dresses. It would have been about how a once quaint and unassuming sporting event became so unabashedly about the Benjamins that when Will Mann, the president of the Professional Golf Association, praised the Ryder at the closing ceremonies as "devoid of commercialism," a substantial portion of the crowd laughed -- loudly -- in his face.
But as it turned out, the story of the Ryder Cup was golf. The spoiled Americans rose from the ashes to defeat the somewhat-less-spoiled Europeans by playing as gritty, blood-and-guts a version of golf as golf will allow. The Yanks came back and changed the minds of those who thought they were a bunch of individualists who didn't appreciate playing for team and honor. Those who paid two grand to get into the Country Club celebrated like madmen next to the few who sneaked past the gate. Dollars took a back seat to drama, and the ritziest sporting event in Boston history delivered the one item that no checkbook could buy: heart.
It didn't start out that way, however.
Opening ceremonies of the 33rd Ryder Cup: Thursday, September 23. Pre-show entertainment: Glenn Frey. Before anyone can yell "Fore!", the ex-Eagle is onstage near the Country Club's practice range, belting out his Miami Vice-era chestnuts, including "The Heat Is On" and "You Belong to the City." The incoming crowd mostly talks or half-hums through Frey's half-hour set, but considering that the entertainment at last night's swish Ryder gala at Symphony Hall was Celine Dion, I feel like we've drawn the long straw.
To judge from the pop stars and the celeb fans and the avalanche of media attention, you might have assumed that the Ryder Cup was some kind of mega-populist sporting moment. This is not the case. Though it has fans on both sides of the Atlantic, the Ryder Cup doesn't have the cross-cultural appeal of the Olympics, soccer's World Cup, or even the Indianapolis 500. It drew about 30,000 people per day, roughly the same as a Red Sox home stand. The television ratings for the matches were excellent, but no higher than for an average NFL regular-
season telecast.What makes the Ryder Cup a certifiable Big Deal is its demographic. Compared to, say, the Super Bowl or the NCAA basketball tournament, the Ryder Cup gets only a small number of people really excited, but this small population has a grossly disproportionate stake in the world's economy. From an advertiser's standpoint, the Ryder Cup audience is the crème de la crème. This is why the PGA could sell 59 corporate "tents" at prices ranging from $150,000 to $500,000. This is why NBC paid $13 million for broadcast rights to the Cup. This is why the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald felled a chunk of the Pacific Northwest to bring you hole-by-hole analysis. It isn't because every person cares about the Ryder Cup. It's because the right people do.
So who are these people? Well, it turns out they're not really snobs. Prior to the event, much was made of golf's elitism and the Country Club's own questionable history of denying membership to individuals of particular ethnicities and origins, but the crowd filing through the gates isn't particularly rarefied. There are some skyward-tilted noses and some Mayflower descendants around, to be sure, but I count just one pair of coral pants the entire week. And I'm looking.
No, this year's edition of the Ryder Cup pulls a crowd that's more junior executive than ultra preppy. The Ryder Cup is one of those sporting events where the true allegiances of the fans are apparent from the backs, not the fronts, of their ball caps. That's because many people in the crowd wear hats with Ryder Cup logos above the bill and their corporate affiliations on the back. Just in my immediate view at the 14th green are hats from Ernst & Young, Dell, Xerox, BankBoston, NBC, and Battery Ventures.
More than anything else, the Ryder Cup is corporate fetish-porn. It's three days of the world's best golf played before people who, between board meetings and seminars and parenthood, generally spend all their time thinking about golf. It's slick and organized and expensive and packaged and full of corpo creature comforts such as TVs in the picnic areas, mobile ATMs, and cell-phone checking booths. (Phones aren't allowed on the course, lest the sound of someone's Nokia disturb play; from the way people anxiously check their phones in, you'd think they were dropping off two-year-olds at a day-care center.) And because corporate work is never really done, there's even a United States Postal Service tent behind the 18th fairway.
But nothing epitomizes the culture more than the corporate tents. First off, they aren't really tents. That bulky white canvas thing your sister got married under two Augusts ago in New Hampshire -- that was a tent. These are more like houses. Nice houses. They are wood paneled and marble floored and climate controlled and staffed with waiters and bartenders. They have windows and porches and televisions and signage and their own special identification passes. In fact, the corporate tents are situated in their own little gated communities with names such as the Francis Ouimet Village and the Samuel Ryder Village. Tenants at the Ryder Village include Choate Hall & Stewart, Ropes & Gray, Pepsi-Cola, Oldsmobile, MassMutual, and State Street Global Investments.
But the real fat cats, I'm told, are watching it from home -- specifically, the private homes surrounding the course, where they can dart out from the woods and catch the action. (Michael Jordan has one of these joints, apparently.) The corporate-tent crowd is more like what you'd find in the boxes at Fenway or the $77 seats at a Bruins game. That is to say, the kind of crowd that tucks in its polo shirts and wears a belt with its shorts and knows what brie is, but wouldn't necessarily buy it at the store. Without fuss, they munch on $5 burgers and $3 cookies and sip $4.75 beers from plastic cups.
There are other things about the crowd I probably don't have to tell you, like the fact that it's mostly male, almost entirely white, and light on authentic Boston townies. (I was expecting to hear Tigaaaaaaahhh! every time Tiger Woods hit the fairway, but I heard it only once or twice.) You also can't help but notice that many of the people attending to these customers are of different ethnicities and national origins. And you can't help but notice that when Sunday's improbable US comeback occurs, the hired help on their break outside one corporate tent have their TV tuned to football.
One must-have item of the 33rd Ryder Cup: a transistor radio with headphones. You can either bring your own or buy the Official 33rd Ryder Cup Transistor Radio with Headphones for a semi-reasonable $12. The reason: with a radio, you can listen to a live feed of the Ryder Cup broadcast, which is crucial to understanding what the heck is going on elsewhere on the course (there are leader boards posted here and there, but some of these are staffed by slowpokes who are chronically behind the action). You have your choice of listening to either the NBC/USA Network feed or the BBC feed, but at first I have trouble locating either station. Instead, I spend the first hour wandering the course while listening to a religious program called "In and Out of Season" with Father Tom DeLorenzo.
I eventually locate the NBC/USA feed, marked by the syrupy gushings of host Dick Enberg, who does little but make me yearn for Father Tom. The pleasantly Eurocentric BBC broadcast is much better, but the NBC/USA is far more popular in the galleries, which makes for some interesting moments on the course. When a commentator makes a crack -- as NBC's Johnny Miller does on Saturday, when he says Justin Leonard "needs to go home and watch [the rest of the Cup] on TV" -- it launches a silence-shattering chorus of chuckles. This proves extremely distracting and annoying to the players, for reasons understood by anyone who has ever declined headphones for a funny movie shown on an airplane.
What really makes the Ryder scene enjoyable, however, is the European fans. Almost to a person, they out-cheer, out-smile, and, yes, out-drink their US counterparts. The Euros gaily sing songs and goad their comparatively tight-assed American counterparts to loosen up, try to forget how much they spent on tickets, and enjoy themselves. "They [American fans] are a bit strange, a bit odd," says a young Dubliner, J.P. Croke, who's draped himself in an Irish flag on which he's written YOU'LL NEVER WALK ALONE in black marker. "They all tend to be a little too . . . serious."
It helps, of course, that the Euros get off to a flash start. At the start of the tournament, the conventional wisdom is that if the heavily favored Americans have one weakness, it's team play. And for once, the conventional wisdom is right. The first two days of Ryder competition consist of foursome matches, where pairings from both sides try to best each other. Here, the Europeans prove vastly superior; they thump the Americans 6-2 on day one, and lead 10-6 at the end of Saturday.
The Euros are also a far more compelling team personality-wise. There's Scotland's Colin Montgomerie (or "Monty"), the reigning European PGA champion of the past six years, who plays as aggressively as if his life hung in the balance and looks like a daintier version of Bill Parcells (or like Mrs. Doubtfire, a drunk guy on the train remarks one night); Jasper Parnevik, the eccentric lava-dust-eating Swede whose sartorial signature is his baseball cap, which he wears with the bill upturned in order to tan his face; Padraig Harrington, the Protestant from Dublin who became a CPA before he earned his tour card; Darren Clarke, the Catholic from Northern Ireland who easily wins the Irish-heavy crowd's guy-I'd-most-like-to-share-a-pint-with competition; Miguel Ángel Jiménez, the Spaniard who seems to enjoy lighting up a smoke after a choice drive; and 19-year-old Sergio García, also of Spain, the youngest competitor in Ryder Cup history. García looks like Adam Sandler with baby fat, plays the crowd like a maestro, and, paired with Parnevik, basically kicks the shit out of everyone for the first two days.
The biggest reason to like the European team, however, is its coach, Mark James. Around here, we like to think of Bill Parcells as a colorful team leader. But there's no comparison. Parcells is an arrogant, moody autocrat who occasionally gets off a good one-liner, usually at the expense of one of his own players. James -- a 23-year European PGA veteran who nearly qualified for his own team (he finished 13th, just outside the top-10 finish needed to make it) -- is a sharp, self-effacing coach with a deadpan style that makes him seem like a cross between Dean Smith and the late Graham Chapman of Monty Python's Flying Circus. When a bubbly Fleet Street reporter asks James if he's excited about Friday's pairing of Sergio García and Tiger Woods, James responds with his lips pursed, teeth clenched, cheeks tight: "Yes. I think it is extremely exciting."
In contrast, the American team is about as much fun as a buffet line at Sizzler when the ribs run out. Let me be the 10,000th journalist to tell you that this is a 12-guys-12-cabs kind of bunch. You have players like Woods, who for all his brilliance on the course has yet to grow comfortable in the public spotlight; David Duval, the world's number-two player, whose brooding manner and mirrored RoboCop sunglasses make him look like an automaton even when he wins; Mark O'Meara, Woods's 42-year-old buddy from Orlando, whose me-first reputation makes him the winner in the guy-I'd-least-like-to-share-a-pint-with competition; and Payne Stewart, whose own mother attributed his recent improvement and win at the '99 US Open to the fact that he stopped being rude to people. The US team also includes a cadre of lesser-known guys such as Leonard, Phil Mickelson, Davis Love III, Jim Furyk (a dead ringer for Massachusetts House Speaker Thomas Finneran), Jeff Maggert, Steve Pate, and Hal Sutton, a burly 18-year veteran from Shreveport, Louisiana, who never turns heads in restaurants but winds up going undefeated through three days of Cup play and pretty much carries the team on his back.
The US team is coached by "Gentle Ben" Crenshaw, whose most infamous Ryder Cup moment came in 1987, when he not-so-gently smashed and broke his putter and was forced to putt the rest of his match with his one-iron and wedge. But don't let that fool you. Crenshaw is genuinely gentle and polite and someone to root for. Another guy to root for on the American team is Tom Lehman. Lehman, who is 40, is a quiet, unassuming guy who nearly quit pro golf in the '80s, but instead went back to golf school, practiced, practiced, practiced, and rebuilt himself. He didn't qualify for the Ryder Cup team, but he played the Country Club on his own, impressing Crenshaw, who put Lehman on the team as a captain's pick. The other reason to like Tom Lehman is that, in an era when players are sponsored by telecommunications giants and fashion kingpins, Lehman is sponsored by Dockers. In fact, the meanest thing you could probably say about Tom Lehman is "nice pants."
You probably know, of course, that the biggest pre-Ryder controversy involved infighting on the American team over -- what else? -- money. Apparently, a few of the younger bucks, including Woods and Duval (as well as older buck O'Meara), were bummed that the Ryder was making mucho dinero for the PGA and they weren't seeing a piece of the action. Although this account was later amended (the players said they were just seeking donations to charitable organizations of their choice), the damage was already done: going in, the Americans were seen as a bunch of money-grubbing ingrates who didn't appreciate or respect the purity and honor of team sport.
But they had a point. It's a bit goofy to wax euphoric about the purity and honor of a competition so laden with corporate sponsorship that it has an official lawnmower and shot glass. The PGA seems to have sold off every piece of potential revenue to every potential sponsor it could find. Pepsi is the official cola beverage, Oldsmobile the official car, the M&M ice-cream-cookie sandwich the official ice-cream-cookie sandwich, and so on. I've also heard that for an undisclosed fee, Fleet/BankBoston paid God to provide good weather for the three competition days.
The zenith of this rampant commercialism is the Ryder Cup Golf Shop/souvenir tent -- again, not a tent so much as a canvas-wrapped edifice, a glossy, wood-paneled, carpeted superstore that would fit quite nicely in a downtown mall. And how 'bout those prices! Seventy-four bucks for a Cutter & Buck Ryder Cup polo; $28 for a fitted hat; $1175 for Ryder Cup cuff links; $12 for Kid Golf children's golf gloves (healthy kid-friendly motto: "Win at Golf!"); $10 for that shot glass; $6500 for a bronze statuette of Country Club legends Francis Ouimet and Eddie Lowery. Not that these prices are doing anything to sap corpo-customer interest. Most times of the day, you have to wait at least 15 minutes to go inside.
What's more, judging from the golf shop's inventory, it's clear that some of the American players are getting a piece of the action. Although Euro-endorsed products are in short supply, there's plenty of Tiger Woods Nike gear, Ben Crenshaw sweaters, and (ugh) David Duval sunglasses. But Phil Mickelson and his dad, Phil Sr., are the big winners. The elder Mickelson's eponymous company makes handsome metal periscopes that allow you to view the action from the middle of a crowd. At $58 a pop, they are easily the event's most expensive must-have item, since the crowds around many greens and fairways have attendees elbowing each other and stomping on each others' feet for a view. In fact, when Mickelson the younger was at the 14th green on Sunday, I counted 136 periscopes on the premises, which translates to a tidy single-hole gross of $7888.
Players' wives and girlfriends play a significant role at the Ryder Cup. This I didn't expect. We're used to the presence of significant others at the conclusions of major sporting events -- the dramatic TV shots of the hand-wringing wives in the luxury boxes, the victorious ballplayer leaning over to plant a smooch on his lady in the grandstand -- but wives and girlfriends are practically front and center at the Cup. Many of them ride or walk the course with their man's entourage during all three days of the tournament, and hug or kiss him after key victories. I guess this companionship is nice, but it begins to be a little creepy when the guys in the gallery start paying as much attention to Tiger's steady, Joanna Jagoda, as they do to the World's Best Golfer himself.
The best way to describe the wives and girlfriends of professional golfers is to say that they look like the wives and girlfriends of professional golfers. Pro golfers seem to go for a basic type: blond, thin, and perky. This alone makes them easy to spot on the course, but the wives and girlfriends help out by wearing color-coordinated outfits on each day of the competition. On Friday, it's a sweater-shorts combo in the green-and-primrose colors of the Country Club. Saturday brings blue-and-white-striped shorts and pinstriped charcoal shirts. Sunday's finale provides a showcase for a maroon-blouse-and-chino-shorts ensemble. (The European women, it should be noted, have nothing to do with this color-coordinated rigmarole, and basically wear whatever they want.)
But the real fashion offenders are the US men. In comparison to the Europeans, who wear a mostly dignified array of solids and stripes in primary colors, American-team members dress as though they went to Kmart with blindfolds on. Their outfits are generally too dark and too detailed and barely coordinated. When I see the dreary brown-on-brown ensembles the Americans wear for Thursday's practice round, which make them look like UPS delivery guys, I think they can't do much worse than that. But the true catastrophe is Sunday's selection of maroon shirts speckled with black-and-white photographs of previous Ryder Cup teams. Not since the USFL folded has there been such a sporting-fashion mishap.
Fueling the Ryder hype, of course, is the media. There are more than 1200 members of the fourth estate here; according to the PGA, more than 1000 others were turned away. You have your major newspapers, your minor newspapers, your maggies, your wire services, and your heavy hitters such as the New York Times' Dave Anderson, Sports Illustrated's Rick Reilly (much grayer than his column photo), and best-selling sports author John Feinstein. You have your international reporters, notable not just for their accents, but because they smoke. You have your Boston Globe staffers strutting around in snappy red Cutter & Buck Ryder Cup jackets with the paper's logo emblazoned on the sleeve (somehow, these threads didn't make it onto the backs of the newsies getting short bucks to hawk the Globe outside the club gates). You have your golf-specific press, whose relationship with the PGA is so warm 'n' fuzzy that it would make a Condé Nast fashion editor blush. After one interview, I watch a Golf Channel staffer run up and ask Tiger Woods for an autograph, which he obligingly provides.
George Bush is here! Which one, you ask? All of them! Both the ex-prez and Dubya, to say nothing of Florida guv Jeb and Barbara. The man standing in front of me at the 12th tee offers this nifty field guide to his wife: "See the frail-looking guy over there in the baseball cap? That's President Bush. And the one with the big head and the khakis? That's Jeb. And the one over there with the salt-and-pepper hair? That's George Jr., I mean, George W., whatever. And the one with the white hair and the pearl earrings? That's Barbara."
The Bushes are treated royally in Brookline. Guys with beers shout "Georgie boy!" when the Pride of Kennebunkport march by with their coterie of Secret Service agents, but it's a fond, I-voted-for-ya kind of "Georgie boy!", not a harassing one. There's an impromptu meeting on the 13th fairway between Dubya and fellow late bloomer Dennis Eckersley, who could teach the Texas governor a thing or two about suppressing the wild days and making up for lost time. Dubya's presence in general is supposed to be family time and not a campaign stop, but you could have fooled me. I'm sure a lot of GOP candidates would love the opportunity Bush has, when he sidles up to Crenshaw on the 18th and poses for a handshake photo-op with Woods. Come to think of it, I would love to see Pat Buchanan at the Ryder Cup, ripping up chunks of the fairway and tossing them into the crowd, or banning the European players from the premises, or something.
One of the more pleasing elements of the post-clinch celebration is the presence of champagne. This offers a marked contrast to other major sporting events (the Super Bowl, the NBA championship), where the recent trend has been to hold an alcohol-free post-game celebration on the field instead of an alcohol-soaked one in the locker room, thus turning a traditionally lively moment into a generally antiseptic one. As soon as Payne Stewart concedes his tight match to Monty at the 18th -- a class move, considering that the US has already sealed the Cup -- the Taittinger starts flowing. American players pop the corks, shake the bottles, and begin spraying their teammates and the crowd. So much champagne is spilled that you needn't worry about the hyped millennium champagne shortage: if desperation ensues on New Year's Eve, you can just lick the 18th green at the stroke of midnight.
At this point, I admit, I'm kind of hopeful that the well-lubricated Country Club crowd will swing a little bit out of control, à la Woodstock '99, and start looting the corporate tents (marble floor panels for everybody!), but I'm afraid this isn't that kind of crowd.
Memo to fellow Americans: If we're going to be taken seriously on the international fanscape, we have to develop a few choice songs and chants besides the boorish "U-S-A! U-S-A!" The Europeans have dozens of songs and chants, including the lyrically sparse but emotionally buoyant olé song (sample lyric: "Olé, olé, olé!/Olé, olé, olé!"). Americans, on the other hand, celebrate the Ryder win by singing the Star-Spangled Banner, which makes the jubilant atmosphere at the 18th green feel like morning assembly at a junior-high school.
So the good guys won. Or at least, we won. In dramatic fashion, no less. That seemed to justify the hype, the coverage, the excess. It put a smile on the face of nearly everyone at the Country Club, the PGA, and certainly the Greater Boston Convention and Visitors' Bureau, which estimates the local financial impact of the 33rd Ryder Cup to be somewhere around $150 million. These aren't "trickle-down" dollars, as they say -- I doubt that much of that $150 million was spent at Hooters -- but it's outside money that our peppy local economy will gladly take.
And the lasting memories will be positive ones: Leonard's joyous celebration at the 17th, which pissed off the Euros (who rightfully point out that José María Olazábal still had a putt left) but was wholly understandable to anyone who had ever experienced or seen such a moment. Tiger Woods, burden off his young back, getting a congratulatory hug from superfan pal Michael Jordan. David Duval shedding the mirrored glasses and soaking the fans in champagne. Ben Crenshaw holding the Ryder trophy and weeping, weeping, weeping. And, finally, 30,000 people in Brookline who paid big bucks and wound up seeing something priceless.
The 2001 Ryder Cup will be held at the Belfry, in England. See you there. Last one on the plane sits next to Glenn Frey.
Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com.
