- Ryder Cup
Why the Ryder Cup tamed Tiger and made Monty a hero
Football's penalty shootout is deliberately and calculatedly cruel. It invariably produces unlikely heroes and calamitous individual disasters and it does so because in a shootout, the game's moral polarities are reversed. The players are forced to go from the warmth of the team environment into the nightmare of individual responsibility. If footballers had sought such a thing they'd have been golfers: they didn't sign on for solitary angst.
But penalty shootouts attract non-footballing people like nothing else in the game. The gratuitous cruelty and equally gratuitous drama bring in people with only the faintest interest in football. They watch because they want to see who will fly and - better still - who will crash and burn.
The Ryder Cup is exactly the same. It's golf, but not the game a golfer signs on for. On Friday it begins again: golf with the moral polarities reversed. It's a form of sporting vivisection, in which a live golfer is placed on a Petri dish to see how he copes with playing the sport he excels at in utterly alien circumstances.
A golfer is the cat that walks by itself. He has responsibilities for no one, and no one for him. If he wins all the credit and joy is his; if he fails there is no one to blame. There is a cold, bracing comfort in this solitude: even in defeat you are your own master.
For a footballer, for all players in every team sport, there is a lonely horror in such a prospect but for a golfer, it is the breath of life. No one to drag you down, no one to help you up: no need to trust a soul. It's you, and you alone, alone in both triumph and disaster, and you are the better and the stronger for it.
So the Ryder Cup takes a group of fanatical isolationists, throws them all together and tells them they need to play their very, very best because the fate of their companions, their nation or their continent depends on their ability to sink themselves into a common cause.
For some this brings a weird kind of horror, while for others, it's the blessed relief of slipping into a warm bath after a long walk in the snow. Colin Montgomerie, for all his talent, never won a major tournament, but he was unbeatable in the Ryder Cup. He played in eight teams and never once lost a singles; his half gave Europe their win in 1997 and he sank the winning putt in 2004.
His demeanour in those majors was shambling, awkward, puzzled: unable to understand why these great occasions brought out the worst in him. Yet at as soon as he was wearing the same uniform as every one else he became a strutting marvel with a glow of confidence you could warm your hands on.
Compare and contrast with Tiger Woods, marching up the fairways in his Ryder Cup kit happy as a wet cat, every line of his body registering incomprehension. Other People? I'm sorry, don't get it. I remember watching him partnering Phil Mickelson - not his best friend - in a foursome when Mickelson drove exuberantly into the trees.
The television director had the inspiration to cut to Woods and caught his expression of undisguised disgust: disgust that anyone should play such a shot, deeper disgust that he was supposed to do something about it. What made Woods, for a time, unbeatable in major tournaments failed to operate in a team of more than one.
But as the Ryder Cup regularly reduces the greatest players who ever swished a club to attendant lords, so it makes heroes of people only golf nuts have ever heard of. Last time around, Europe were getting beaten, hammered, totally slaughtered. They needed 10½ of the last 14 points to retain the cup - by all sporting logic this was impossible.
Ah, but sporting logic so often turns out to be a bit of an oxymoron. There was an extraordinary turning of the tide: every man a hero but the greatest heroics of them all came from … Martin Kaymer. The point is that only golf people would have heard of him, and only golf people would have remembered what he did.
But that day at Medinah in Chicago he sank a six-footer on the 18th to beat Steve Stricker. The many non-golfers who were swept up in it all may have forgotten the name, but not the nature of the day, when sport's lords of misrule tore up all theories of logics and let Martin who-he Kaymer bestride the world. (The last word in that contest was left to Woods, who missed a tiddler to hand outright victory to Europe. He's injured and won't be playing this week; the consensus is that this is not a disaster for the United States.)
Like those stories of parents who can scarcely carry the shopping lifting up cars to rescue their children, so the crowded, claustrophobic, other-people-filled circumstances of the Ryder Cup force extraordinary deeds from ordinary golfers. What they have so often failed to do before they can do at last - but only when they have the weight of a team and nation or continent on their backs.
It's not often that golf reaches out beyond golfers. Casual golf-watchers are comparatively rare. The last day of the Open catches British watchers, the last day at the US Masters catches sporting audiences around the world, if only in disbelief at the colours of the flowers.
But the Ryder Cup exerts a pull on all people with sporting blood in their veins; for the schadenfreude that comes from the humbling of the great, for the everyman joys of seeing the unlikely hero and, above all, for the car-crash fascination of seeing how these people in their curious matching clothes will react to the horribly unfamiliar circumstances that have been forced upon them. Circumstances in which tigers become kittens and the strays become tigers for a day.
Simon Barnes was Chief Sports Writer at The Times and UK Sports Columnist of the Year in 2001 and 2007. He writes about a wide variety of sports for ESPN.co.uk, as well as ESPNFC.com and ESPNcricinfo. He has written more than 20 books including The Meaning of Sport and three novels. On Twitter he is @simonbarneswild
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