Golf’s Ryder Cup approaches. It begins the Tuesday after this weekend, in fact, and ends on Sunday. It is the greatest team competition in a sport not really known for team competition. Golf seems, in fact, like just about the most solitary sort of athletic pursuit: One competes against the course and, of course, oneself.
The Americans will be teeing it up against the Europeans, and the event will be hyped to the skies … though the words of John McKay to his USC football team might be appropriate here. “Men,” McKay is supposed to have said, “when you go out there today, I want you to remember one thing. Win or lose, there are going to be six million people in China who don’t give a damn.” (The words have been cleaned up a little to make them suitable for a family website.)
The hot news about the Ryder Cup is that Bubba Watson has not made the American team and it may not change. There is one slot left, and the team captain, Davis Love III, will select someone to fill it on Sunday. On paper, Watson is the logical choice, ranked seventh in the world with two major championships in his career. But, as Jaime Diaz writes at Golf Digest:
And, then, there is that “… anonymous 2015 ESPN poll of players in which Watson was chosen the one they would be least likely help in a parking-lot brawl.”
Still, he is colorful, and the fans like him. Seems like that ought to count for something and even help the TV ratings.
And, were Watson to be the hero on a winning U.S. team, it would mean that the Europeans had been beaten in a sport of aristocrats by a service brat from a little town in the panhandle of Florida called Baghdad.
That would be sweet.
