OH DANNY BOY! A TALE OF WILLETT WILFULNESS

I have to say something.  I can’t be silent or hold it in any longer.  It must out.

The Ryder Cup is upon us and the run-up to this contest of the giants of men’s professional golf always spawns controversy.  It goes with the territory – a territory that is interlaced with pride, nationalism, patriotism, competition and a heaped-to-the- oxters cartload of fun.  There is no prize money but there is a beautiful cup and a shedload of pride at stake.

And I’m not just talking about the golfers.  It invades the mentality and thinking of the fans on both side of the Atlantic divide and those, worldwide, who reside cosily in their armchairs as TV followers.  It’s the way it should be as we walk the course live or ogle the goggle box as twenty-four men play team tactics and individual games to earn the right to bring home the Ryder Cup.  It’s Europe versus America and should be done in the spirit of golf with dignity and bonhomie - an unwritten rule that applies whether you are playing, watching or commenting.

Then there’s the banter.  “The banta” is an integral part of the game.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s “platformed” on social media, scrunched about by leading sports commentators in the newspapers and on the telly, or dependent on exchanges between friends.  The banta is meant to excite and illuminate, never devour or intimidate or exorcise.  Those are the givens.  Bring it on, I say, and let two landmasses, divided by a common language, have the time of their golfing lives.

So, in this busy orchestra of Ryder Cup sounds and with everyone playing vigorously in their particular movement of the symphony, it was all going to plan.  As in any symphony orchestra, there is the expected sonata.  That’s the solo.  And it came, loud and proud and, unexpectedly, way out of context.  Not good.  But it also came from a surprising quarter.  Pete Willett, brother to our brilliant green jacket winner at The Masters this year, struck up the solo chords. This Sheffield steel boy was playing brass band when he should have been playing orchestra.  Yup, he was playing sonata without a string to his bow.  That’s okay when you’re in the colliery band league but not when the rest of the crowd has elected to play with the full orchestra. 

Peter went hardcore satire on Team America.  Satire is good in the right place and in the right time with its use of humour, irony and exaggeration but it is also used to ridicule, expose and criticize and needs a wise hand to temper it.  The article itself, published by National Club Golfer Magazine, was confrontational but honestly addressed some negative issues with golf’s American gallery of on-course followers.  It was published in the week leading up to the Ryder Cup when the media are hungry for stories and will pounce on the least of notions to produce a mountain of a story.  It found it in Peter Willett’s musings. 

And Peter rocketed it into the stratosphere when he tweeted it out with a tag line that read “ And I mean every word”.  However naïve or innocent his intent, he crossed the fine line between sarcastic and sardonic satire and the read became uncomfortable.  Fervent Team Europe supporter that I am, avid follower of Peter Willett and lover of a bit o’banter, I was far from impressed with an outpouring that was no longer a funny send-up. 

Meanwhile, Danny has done it all the right way and was busy assimilating himself to Team Europe style.  He’s prepared well, spent his time in team building, and knows that his greatest achievement to date has been on American soil when he whoop-assed his way along the fairways of Augusta to clinch the Masters.  American supporters cheered him home.  I am in awe of his dedication and style of play and, all the more so, because his brother Pete highlighted and illuminated his golfing brother’s life from the inside track.  You got the distinct impression of a solid family, full of humour and leg-pulling and sibling rivalry but bound together by the overarching “bromance” that exists within the bonds of love of a decent family.  Pete took Twitter down with his riffling commentary on his brother Danny while Danny was all the while taking Augusta down.  But this time and with his latest essay, it looks like Peter has pinned a bullseye target on Danny’s back: it screams “Hit me with Baba Booey and Mashed Potatoes” for sure and I would be horrified if this turned out to be true.

It smacks of distraction, poor judgement, lack of sportsmanlike behaviour, draws attention to an individual when it’s all about team behaviour and, most of all, kills the joy.  We may have won three Ryder Cup victories on the spin but neither team nor captain need the hassle of unwarranted media attention and hostile crowds.  There’s a lot at stake.  And Danny is a rookie who needs not to have the anticipated and unsolicited burden of dealing with the negative responses of a gallery who may see him as the available face of the Willett rant and thus use him to retaliate.

With this faux pas on my mind, I asked myself what lessons I had learnt from this Ryder Cup preamble.  The list became almost biblical.

Speak the truth but speak it in love

Reign in the satire; loose the laughter

Know the difference between banter and badmouthing

Focus on the positives of the task; add whatever you can to the collective whole in a positive manner; if you can’t, better to do nothing than be negative and disparaging

You don’t win the Ryder Cup – or anything else - with your mouth (Segio Garcia); or your pen, laptop or opinion (Anne Foley Smith)

Just because you’re right, it doesn’t mean you’re right

Be gracious, it’s not war

Be big enough to apologise

In life as in golf, these set the margins for a life well lived.  I suspect the late Mr Arnold Palmer knew these lessons well.  

And, finally, if I were a teacher, I’d mark Peter’s essay with a “Could have done better.  See me” tab.

Enough said. 

THE FUTURE OF THE RYDER CUP – a win-win formula for America and Europe?

It’s always a risky business mentioning The Ryder Cup if you are within twenty-five million miles of an American.  It is not that your average American is quick of temper or subject to a sudden fit of the vapours but he is much more likely to plummet into the doldrums of despair and the eternal abyss of hopelessness at the mention of The “Shhh! Let me say it quietly” Ryder Cup.  You see, the US-at-large is not really much good at winning it.

I set about the task of discovering how many TRCs America had actually lost.  It’s not looking good for the Big Country with nine wins for Europe against their four, and one recorded draw, since 1985.  If your maths and brain are holding up, that’s thirty-one years but, in any terms you care to measure it by, it has been a fair long time.

Earlier last year, John Daly’s expressed the wish to be a future captain.  It appears this statement came straight from the horse’s mouth and was not merely a piece of journalistic frippery invented by a sports writer on a bored off-day.  Well done, John.  And while I have no wish to call you a horse, you are a giant of a man in every sense of the word and I think you deserve a shot, gastric band and all– even if it’s a very long shot.  But then, Long John, you have pulled off that sort of bombing shot long before The Dustinator came on the scene and usurped your crown.  At fifty, you can still crush a 300 yard drive with ease and a little birdie in the shape of Wikipedia tells me that you were the first, and still the only player, to reach the green in two on the famous 630 yard seventeenth hole at Baltusrol.  You don’t need me to say “Well done”!

Long John’s personal life may have steeper dips and troughs than the Scream Roller Coaster and his golf may have gone the same way on several occasions but his five PGA Tour wins, a smattering of business acumen with that in-your-face-golfing-gear, his singing career, and his charitable work all show that this is a man who knows how to dig deep and fight back.  Sainted he is not but, in JD’s own words, “Never underestimate the fat man”.  And we don’t.

This is a man who has never lost the common touch: in 1991, when we didn’t know he was ‘Wild Thing’ or could make our hearts sing with his ‘Grip it and rip it’ philosophy, this last minute ninth alternate entered the field at Crooked Stick Golf Club and played his way to victory in that PGA Championship.  But during the first round, a spectator was fatally struck by lightening in a violent storm.  Though not a rich man and on the receipt of his first fat pay cheque as winner, he donated $30,000 towards the education of the dead man’s infant daughters.  Sterling effort there, John, with your dollars investment: those girls are all grown up and graduated successfully.  For sure he has been thrown out of Hooters and alcohol and addiction have played havoc in his life but mention Lori Laird and Make-a-Wish Foundation and there you have a more balanced view of the man.  Perhaps he only one Wild Thing has really hurt is himself.

Golf has a reputation for being a toff’s game with this odd sense that dressing a man in a collared shirt and mock Simon Cowell high-waisted belted trousers somehow morphs them into sporting gentlemen.  “You can’t make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear,” my mother used to say and while I never imagined in my wildest dreams that she would feature alongside John Daly, for once, I agree with her.  There’s more than a grain of truth in that timeworn statement about manners making a man.  So give me a bit of levity here, cut me some slack, dump the stuffy image and let’s see golf ramp it up in the fashion stakes at a showcase event. I am always up for a bit of a clothes statement and I cannot wait to see the American team buzzing in Loudmouth apparel.  I am quite convinced that they will smash the fashion stakes with John in charge.  Sorry, Tom Watson, delightfully mannered and ‘haute-coutured’ as you are in every sense of the word – and I’m a fan - old school won’t win diddley-squat here and it is so last week.  It’s way past time to change if golf is to get a toehold in the brave new world of youth.  Time to pull out all the stops and make the fun happen.

But a Ryder Cup with John in charge of Team America can only mean one thing for us: as a hybrid Irish-Anglophile, I think I am a percentage qualified to say there is only one suitable candidate to lead Team Europe.  Dubbed “The most interesting man in golf” and hailed by Rory as his hero, he has pulled an albatross out of the bag in 2009 by holing a 206-yard six-iron on his second shot on the par five fourth at the BMW PGA Championship title.  Oh yes! Let’s hear it for the one and only Miguel Ángel Jiminez, our Spanish-born, Austrian-residing candidate to captain our team. 

And who will worry about the golf?  It threatens to be a riot, a blast, and a non-stop fly-on-the-wall docudrama of soap land proportions with a plethora of chilled golfing moves thrown in for good measure - JD versus MÁJ, Wild Thing versus Hip Swing, Crooner versus Moonwalker, The Gambler versus The Mechanic.  Imagine the scene: Hooters cater every meal, beer carts on every bunker, and the victory dinner washed down with a vintage Rioja and some fine Cuban cigars.  It’s a no brainer.

Okay, so Miguel The Mechanic, I know you have a fantabulous taste in cars but you don’t have quite the same wardrobe panache as Grip-It-and-Rip-It and I am really trying to be tactful here despite my given nature.  Thankfully, my mother advised me against a diplomatic career and, again, I agree with her.  It would have been a non-starter; I’d have lasted three months and got the sack.  That aside, you need to get the gear on board.  I am not talking urban slang dictionary here - lest The Sunday Times comes chasing after me for inciting the world of golf to transgress – I just want you to snazzy it up in the dressing-up stakes.  Three words will see Team Europe kitted and fitted and ready to compete on Loudmouth level - Royal & Awesome will do it nicely.  Forget the ampersand.  The rest is a Picasso paradise of riotous colour and design.

Now, John, if I could have a quiet word: the shirtless video interview. I’ve seen it. Oh my!  It brings a tear to my eye and it is not one of laughter.  I’m on my knees for the first time in years.  My mother will be eternally grateful: you succeeded where she failed.  I’m praying that fun-loving golfer John will never become an advocate of naked golf.  The rest, as they say, would be mass hysteria.  I tremble.

My Cup runneth over with the Sandbaggers Cup of Slow Play

There are few things in life that rattle my calm or shake my cage too much but the game of golf has managed to supply a couple of words that send me into a flat fried frenzy and make me see life through a red mist.  It’s a subject I lived in blissful unawareness of for all of my years until I took up with the beautiful game and, even when it first fell upon my hemisphere, I paid only a light but respectful cap-tipping nod to it.  However, I have come to hate it, more so because it is a matter that has never been resolved, quite possibly never will, has been flogged to death a million times, resuscitated, and resurrected like the proverbial phoenix to womble its way eternally through every platform of social media that has ever been conceived and is yet to come.  I can’t prove it but it probably exists in a parallel universe where it is designated as a weapon of torture and it seems to travel in a perpetual circle like particles in the Large Hadron Collider.

For me then, the two words of mass destruction are Slow Play.

The first thing you need to know is that it’s out there.  It always has been.  It’s primordial and existed in the Big Bang Soup before it crawled out and took on a life of its own.  The day golf was invented was the day slow play began.  Nobody ever began a sport for the first time ever and played it like they were in the Olympic heights of perfection so it doesn’t matter where you look, starting out is always at a slow pace.  Golf is no exception.  In all sport, some will learn faster than others and that is a matter of talent or time or money or opportunity or even a smacking of luck, which in turn leads to differentiation and, ultimately, competition.  Since competition is all about skill, dexterity and speed of execution, some will be faster and fitter than others.  It’s a given.  Get over it.

The second thing you need to know is that it’s here to stay – it doesn’t matter if you were not around in the garden of golf’s Eden.  If you play golf, once upon a time in la-la-land, you too were a beginner and the important bit is you were slow.  So as long as there is golf, there will always be beginners and there will always be slow play.  It’s another given.  Make room for it on your playing schedule whatever your level.  In everyday parlance, I think we call it forbearance.  Get on with it.

The third thing you need to handle is the need to grow the game.  I am going to make a cracking assumption here.  You want the game to be inclusive, right?  That means all-embracing: gender, non-gender, transgender, straight, gay, lesbian, old, young, middle-aged, colour, non-colour, fit and not-so-able bodied.  The list is by no means complete but you are getting the gist.  We encompass “people-kind” – I’ve coined a new word - with all their imperfections: a warts-and-all embrace.   If you’re really going to grow the game this means slow play is the take-off point and there is no avoiding it.  Give over and get it together.

The fourth thing you need to ponder on is image.  I’m not talking about how cool you look in your Calvin Kleins or how ace you are at the machinations of the golf swing.  Think telly.  Think what we see beamed in to our homes and heads with regularity:  the pro golfers who take time over their shots - and they are many.  Yes, some sit in the doldrums of a putt long enough for me to spring-clean the house, mow the lawns, feed the neighbour’s cat and paint the guest bedroom, but I never moan.  I see it like this – what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander and that apt adage adds it up neatly in the astute “action speaks louder than words” axiom.  Whatever our handicap, we forever live in hope of improving our game and we will happily garner all that we glean from the television for use in our game.  We will never reverse the slow play trend unless it is regulated and broadcast into the public domain and brain.  Get my drift here.

The fifth and final thing you need to know is this: if I gathered up all the slow play solutions that have been postulated, turned them into wallpaper and bequeathed the resulting rolls to Queen Elizabeth 2, she could happily wallpaper over Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, the Palace of Holyroodhouse and Hillsborough Castle.  And if she wants a day off from her official residences, she can cut and paste her way through her private residences at Sandringham House, Balmoral Castle, Craigowan Lodge or Deinadamph Lodge and still have a scroll down yardage of roll left over.  The message is… erm – the solutions are not working.  If they were, we would surely not be bantering the topic round like those quarks, anti-quarks and gluons of Hadron’s perpetual circuit.  Get a fix on it.

Do I have a solution to this?  Of course I do.  I wasn’t born yesterday or the day before and it’s taken years to cultivate this level of laissez faire.  My solution, God help us, for slow play is this: take an 18 hole golf course, split it in two lots of nine, divide the handicappers into two categories with fast players going round their nine holes faster than the speed of sound for as many times as they like while the slowbies and newbies and high handicappers haltingly grind round the other nine at their own preamble and speed.  Every few months, swop the nines over to maintain interest.  Mark the speedos from the slow-gos with different coloured tabards and if one class of golfers should cross the great divide onto the wrong nine, let the turf war commence.  Forget the Ryder Cup - handbags, golbags and man bags at dawn duels and we could all fight for the new accolade of the Sandbaggers Cup.  Get out there and try that for size.

ON POINT TO THE RYDER CUP

The Ryder Cup has not even begun but the controversy has.  It’s not the usual culprits of Team USA and Team Europe having a bit of boy banter.  Oh no, it’s much more complex than that.  

Captain Darren Clarke of Team Europe has made his final selections and the twelve- man team is now complete – but it did not include the long anticipated inclusion of Russell Knox.  Captain Clarke says it was one of the toughest calls he has had to make in his golfing career; Knox says it lasted twenty seconds.  So I time it because I’m made like that: “Hi Russell; Hello, Darren; I’m afraid you’ve not made it this time; That’s okay, Darren; Better luck next time.  It really is a shame you hadn’t joined the European tour before you won last November; Bye, Darren”.  Of course I’m making it up but it must have had a glinting of those words in the conversation and I may be wrong here but that wasn’t difficult.  Short and to the point, yes.  Awkward, yes.  The agony only begins when you have protracted salutations and exchanges of conversation that require discussion.  I should imagine there was none to very little.  

(Sorry, Darren, but the point goes to Russell.)

The lovely Darren, in his lilting Irish accent that would probably charm the creamy head off a pint of Guinness, went on to say that team is more important than “the playing bit” and team ethos was the enabler of past successes.  He sure is right in that observation.  

(Take a point, Captain.)

Things got a little bit more hairy at this point, however, with Tom English of BBC Scotland, wading in with the astute comment that Knox had two ranking events left to play following his early August Travelers tournament win, and the playing therein would show his commitment and intent to qualify for the team.  He did neither, choosing instead to play on the cash cow that is The Barclays FedEx - which carries no Ryder Cup points – and doing so in spite of Clarke asking him to play at Wyndham.  

(Disregarding this genuine request is not your best move, Russell, so Darren scores the point here.) 

Knox appeared to become more obnoxious when he recounted in an interview with Golf Digest a couple of weeks earlier that there was a “moral obligation” to pick him and that he should be first pick of the Captain’s three wildcards.  We will never know if Clarke was swayed by that Knox-on-Knox egotistical remark but it certainly jars with Clarke’s statement of the importance of team ethos.  

(Not-nice- narcissism is null and dull so the point goes unreservedly to Captain Clarke.)

Team Europe were bewitched by all of this but the Americans loved it and so did Davis Love III, Captain of Team USA.  Stirring the Ryder Cup cauldron to fever pitch, he claimed he would pick Russell, pointing out that he’s the highest ranked player not on Team Europe.  And he’s right.  Knox is ranked at 20, ahead of automatic qualifiers Cabrera Bello 27, Wood 28, Sullivan 42 and Fitzpatrick 48.  The Captain’s wildcard picks of Westwood, Kaymer and Pieters show rankings of 46, 50 and 41 respectively.  (But you’re not getting any points here, Davis.  Sorry, you’re the opposition and it’s hard enough amassing points for our own side even if they are points scored from in-house fighting.)

Love is currently lumbered with a post-op recovery from a hip replacement – a sincere and unfettered return to rude health, sir - and is doing so under a copious mound of spreadsheet statistics and a mahoosive menagerie of advice from all and sundry, and Phil Mickelson (who wants another Gleneagles speech of that calibre?), on who should be his Captain’s picks.  All sides of the Atlantic are eagerly awaiting the names of those who will fill the shoes of the four vacant spots on Team USA and, inclusive or exclusive, this Ryder Cup match promises to be like none other before with a team of veteran golfers from the US desperate for a win against a disproportioned European side that sports six raw rookies.  

(Oh Darren, you may have easily won the PR exchanges with Russell but the portends for bringing home the Ryder Cup are not awarding you much by way of points here.)

It does not take long to figure that I am batting for Darren and his golfing dozen.  I have nothing against the US but I happen to live “over here” on the edge of Europe, right up close to the home of golf.  It comes naturally that I should want to hold on to the Ryder Cup - along with the throng of European supporters - but I can’t see it happening at Hazeltine.  Masters champion Willett is wilting and his form is not even smouldering given his recent exit from the FedEx Cup.  Fitzpatrick has the troughs and peaks of a Big Dipper beguiling his play with his top ten finish in the Masters cancelled out by his failing to make the cut at the Open.  The lovely Kaymer has left his best form sitting back on the wire-to-wire victory of 2014.  That’s two years ago, Martin.  It seems our great hopes lie in the stratospheric Stenson and the golden Rose, the solid playing of Westwood and perhaps the recent hot shot play of Rory who seems to have found a smattering of form at last.  

(There are more points to be scored here for form - or lack thereof -but I'm doing my best to refrain.)

Musings like these brought me to the idea that maybe it was time to introduce another Captain’s wildcard – one that would allow the captain to de-select at least one automatically qualifying player if his playing was lacklustre on the run-up to the Ryder Cup.  Now that would put the proverbial cat amongst the pigeons and keep them on red alert and, if that wildcard was available to Clarke right now, there might have been a late shoo-in reprieve for Knox.  

(But that is only conjecture and a pointless exercise to parry.)

To Hazeltine and beyond…