Down the tube

The Ryder Cup on TV

by Jeffrey Gantz

Battling the crowds at the hilly Country Club in Brookline may not have been any picnic, but for this confessed Ryder Cup addict, watching on TV was no piece of cake either. At 6 a.m. Friday the Golf Channel ran a taped interview with Euro team member José María Olazábal. Coverage on USA started at 7:30 a.m. and ran continuously till 6 p.m., after which the Golf Channel picked up with the captains' press conferences, an hour of Golf Central (like ESPN's SportsCenter but devoted entirely to golf and, this day, almost entirely to the Ryder Cup), and an hour of Viewer's Forum (more analysis and viewer comments). That was it for the live doings, but just in case the Yanks hadn't fared too well (as in fact they hadn't at that point) and people were itching to kick some British/Euro butt, the Golf Channel offered a couple hours of highlights from previous Cup matches -- all American victories, of course. The whole thing repeated on Saturday (coverage by NBC) and, with a slightly later start, on Sunday.

I'm not surprised that the Ryder Cup has become big-time TV. Walking a golf course puts you in touch with the emotions of the players and with the crowd, but you don't see much. Even on Ryder Cup Sunday, with only 24 golfers in action, you're stuck watching just two, perhaps from six or seven deep in the crowd. Or you hit the bleachers and see each group play just one hole. Either way, your VCR better be running. Golf on TV, on the other hand, is golf heaven. Those chipmunk-eye cameras detail every twig, every blade of grass; there's no lie they can't show, no missed putt they can't explain, no swing flaw they can't dissect. The TV audience sees more than even the golfers do.

Ryder Cup Sunday is the ultimate golf telecast. It has all the drama of election night and none of the political consequences. The contest invariably goes the distance. It's only once every four years that it's televised at a convenient viewing time (i.e., when the Cup is contested on this side of the pond), so it's special, like the Olympics. Best of all, it has America facing off against an international opponent we figure to beat, since Europe's golf resources are piddling by comparison.

Yet over the past nine contests, the US has gotten its hands on the Cup just four times. How come? Well, it's really two competitions. Friday and Saturday have the players teaming up in foursome (alternate-shot) and fourball (better-ball) matches, the kind of everyday golf amateurs play all over the world. Sunday the 12 members of each team square off in head-to-head match play. Through the history of the Ryder Cup, Europe has excelled in the communal phase, America in the individual.

Obvious as this point is, the USA/NBC crew -- headed by the generally clueless Dick Enberg and the generally clued-in Johnny Miller -- couldn't grasp it. Looking at recent Ryder Cup statistics, Enberg concluded, "There doesn't seem to be any reason why the partnership [success] is on the European side." Following Hal Sutton and Jeff Maggert Friday afternoon, Gary Koch told us, "I really like what Jeff and Hal are doing, just playing their own game and not getting in each other's way." And when Tiger Woods and David Duval huddled on the ninth green, we were told, "This is the second occasion on which they've conferred" -- meaning only the second time they'd conferred in the match.

Sure, you can make an argument for rugged Yankee individualism, but not when we keep losing in foursomes and fourball. It's the pair chemistry that wins these matches, not the individual talent. Yet, on Friday, after a disappointing halve, even Johnny Miller bobbled: "You'd think it would be automatic to have [Davis] Love and [Payne] Stewart going against [Miguel Ángel] Jiménez and [Padraig] Harrington." (Not a single American, by the way, was able to get Jiménez's name right.) Well, yes, if you paired off Love against Jiménez and Stewart against Harrington in individual matches, the way they do on Sunday, the Americans would win most every time. But that's exactly what the first two days of the Ryder Cup are not about. They're about playing together.

Friday night, after the pay-for-play Americans had embarrassed themselves into a 2-6 deficit against the vastly inferior Euro team, the Golf Channel's Viewer's Forum program had a seemingly odd question for its phone-in poll: "Which side are you rooting for?" Yet the answer proved no more automatic than the pairing of Love and Stewart: 58 percent went for the underdog Euros. Probably they were remembering that Paul Revere didn't ask about compensation before he got on his horse and rode out to Lexington and Concord.

Saturday was better: our golfers restored America's honor by playing the Euros dead even, and an emotional Captain Ben Crenshaw told the press, "I've never been so proud of a bunch of guys in all my life." Well, Yankee Doodle -- who wouldn't be busting his buttons after Woods and Duval, the number-one and number-two golfers in the world, lost by a mere two holes to Euro heavyweights Lee Westwood (number five) and Darren Clarke (number 21)? Or after Love (number four) and Stewart (number eight) fought to that glorious draw against Jiménez (number 36) and Harrington (number 74)? It's just as well our guys didn't play up to their real abilities -- Ben would have split his pants.

By Saturday night, though, the foursome and fourball matches were over and the Americans at last figured out what the Euros had that they didn't: not teamwork (though that was certainly missing) or hot putting (that too), but spin control -- and I don't mean the kind Justin Leonard puts on his eight-iron. Down four points, our guys contrived to style themselves the hopeless underdogs, shifting all the pressure back onto the Euros and imploring America to rally round the flag. They even called in Governor George W. Bush to read them a speech from the battle of the Alamo.

The Viewer's Forum audience wasn't fooled: when asked, "Do you think America will win the Ryder Cup?", 55 percent answered yes. They may have been rooting for the Euros, but they didn't need the TV analysts to tell them (and, in fact, none did) that our guys would actually be the favorites in 10 of the 12 matches, more than enough to take back the Cup. Unlike the NBC crew, these viewers probably also remembered that two years ago, when the Ryder Cup was contested in Valderrama, Spain, the Americans picked up eight points on the final day. Since we had a better team this time and were playing at home, on a course manicured to our specifications, eight and a half didn't seem too much to ask. But our guys stuck to their "Do you believe in miracles?" approach, with Mark O'Meara blithely explaining that it was his job to keep his match against Padraig Harrington close and encourage the rest of the team. No one dared ask the world's number-10 player why it wasn't his job to beat the world's number 74. Instead, Dick Enberg kept telling us that the Americans "must prove to the world that they can overcome incredible odds." What, like not being the favorite in all 12 matches?

So it went throughout Sunday, and to its credit, the American team finally delivered, winning big, if somewhat ugly. In their press conference, the Europeans overcomplained about the American celebration after Leonard's crucial putt on the 17th hole (juvenile and insulting as it was, it lasted only 45 seconds); the Americans responded by underapologizing. The British tabloid press went bonkers, with headlines such as DISGUSTING; UTTER DISGRACE; and US SLOBS, referring to that celebration and also to the Brookline boors who barfed during Brit backswings. (Nasty words won't hurt the Americans, but they'll be in real trouble if the European PGA moves the 2001 site from the American-friendly Belfry course, in Warwickshire, to Scottish Carnoustie, where American golfers all but disappeared in the high rough at the British Open this summer.) Meanwhile, our guys were still in a snit because Johnny Miller had had the temerity to suggest that some of them weren't playing well; they even got mad when he predicted that one or two of them might lose Sunday.

The Ryder Cup was established back in 1927 by a Brit, Samuel Ryder, whose goal was not to determine which country had the better golfers but to promote sportsmanship and camaraderie between England and America. By that standard, our golfers -- the better players without a doubt -- fell woefully short until, in the last match, after the outcome was decided, Payne Stewart came to their rescue. Explaining at the press conference why he had conceded a lengthy birdie putt, and his match, to the bear-baited Colin Montgomerie, Stewart said, "My individual statistics don't mean crap." If, years from now, Dick Enberg starts babbling on about the "Miracle in Massachusetts," I won't think of Justin Leonard's 45-foot putt. I'll think of Payne Stewart's crap.