Captaincy and the Ryder Cup have always been synonymous, and when that competition comes around every second year, one gets to contemplate both at the same time.
We are about to get a really plum case study this month.
This Sunday Column today believes that it will be a truly dramatic match-up, and not at all in the uplifting way people think and hope.
Some have now got a taste for humiliating Europe.
It is becoming evermore difficult to regularly write about our sector, and avoid mentioning political grandstanding and power plays. If you don’t believe this premise, think better. Sport does not live in the happy little island it did even 20 years ago.
Money, demographics and geopolitics.
This sadly is where we are, and the Ryder Cup is about to become The Hunger Games.
Because it is the only example of high-profile professional athletes competing as a team under the European flag of blue with stars. Golf, on reflection, is actually a unique proxy for a united Europe, and maybe the only positive symbol (even outside sport) of everything people hoped the whole project would be.
The EU, previously known as the Common Market, the EEC, has just never delivered what the visionaries all planned for: namely, the “United States of Europe”. A failure encapsulated perfectly in the complete lack of authority and gravitas of its current unelected “captain”, Ursula Von der Leyen.
She counts for absolutely nothing when the chips are down, and most certainly isn’t a Thatcher or a Merkel. Indeed, in these last 10 years, since the host of “The Apprentice” won the US presidency, we have seen all too well the dramatic decline of the old Continent in general, and her Brussels bureaucracy in particular.
Some people now want to ram that point home. And the Ryder Cup is “the mark”.
The caption accompanying this viral meme was: “How it started, how it’s continuing”. The optics are utterly humiliating.
Whilst the countries of Europe have never really got on, at least in the past they each had a proper, credible leader to represent their tribe on occasions like this. Their successors today, who we all saw kiss the ring in the Oval Office last month, are a pallid, pathetic shadow, and that’s being very generous. You wouldn’t have given this lot a fiver to get the milk, rolls and a newspaper in our day.
Europe and its leadership have never been weaker, and everyone knows it. Trump, Modi, Putin, Saudi, the Chinese. It’s the chatter of the intelligentsia in dining rooms from Vienna to Vladivostok, Washington to Warsaw.
The take-away from everyone? Europe is done, with absolutely no leadership.
A pertinent op-ed example is here:
Trump now wants to rub it in, huge, and that is really what this Ryder Cup is all about.
One guy wins, the other schmuck loses.
If globalisation is reversing, as it is, we are now in the game of winners and losers where, for America to be great again, others need to decline. It’s just arithmetic.
Exactly this is the wider context of what is to come in Bethpage, NY, and Trump won’t miss the opportunity, especially as golf is his sport. Worryingly, he is also renowned to be a bit haphazard on what he believes to be “truth” on the course. They have written books about his “cheating”.
Sigh!
Does anyone think that leopards change their spots? Is he all of a sudden going to find Jesus in golfing honour and etiquette?
More likely he will instead take great pleasure in figuratively stepping all over the putting line of the Europeans. And giving his team every mulligan possible.
America will accept nothing but a win.
The USA, like the EU, has very few moments when its elite athletes play as a team under the star-spangled banner. Almost none outside of some relays in the Olympics. All their main team sports are domestic and insular to the max, and there are precious few opportunities for the nation to get behind Uncle Sam, as a united tribe.
The Ryder Cup is, therefore, pretty special, and the 45th edition will undoubtedly be used with gusto by this Administration to further the MAGA brand. Trump will attend on the Friday start, with the rhetoric and vitriol already not so encouraging.
This isn’t going to be pleasant, or elegant, or dignified. Certainly not sporting. Brace yourselves.
We are going to Bethpage to kick their fucking ass.
– Keegan Bradley, US Ryder Cup Captain, 2025.
The tone and specific language of this article (and video) give us the steer on the ordeal awaiting our players on American soil. It is a chilling read.
Home advantage is going to really matter.
The last five editions of the Samuel Ryder trophy have been won very handily by the hosting team. In fact, it seems that playing on your own green turf, in front of your own fans, is now becoming a major advantage.
Some may say that this just reflects the lower standards of fairness and etiquette along all fairways these days. Fan heckling/abuse, especially in America, has been on a rising trend, with patrons gleefully cheering missed fairways and putts. The betting markets have played a role in all this also. In fact, the general raucousness of golf, often now encouraged for commercial reasons, has taken the game to places unimaginable by the old custodians of the Augusta National and The Royal and Ancient.
Here, the aptly named golfer Sam Ryder, in Arizona, gives us a foretaste of our near future this month.
This would be bad enough, but it could be a lot lot worse, and not for good reasons.
Keegan Bradley is Franz Ferdinand.
Bradley may be an excellent golfer, but he is deep down a bit of a nutter. He doesn’t have a chip on his shoulder; he has the whole Grand Canyon.
“Underestimated all his life”, never one of the cool frat kids of Jordan, Zach and Justin, walks a bit funny, never respected, even as a major-winner. Keegan is just an angry man, no matter how hard he tries to hide it. To use the modern term; he is truly “pumped!”.
In fact, there is a credible debate that the US PGA has made a horrendous mistake with his appointment, offered out of guilt, and the price for their error will be felt well beyond the fairways and greens of Bethpage. The game itself may suffer.
MAGA, and the American thirst for revenge, is an explosive cocktail of volatility that is just looking for its Franz Ferdinand moment, and Bradley could be the very man. Whilst we all hope to keep the Ryder Cup only about match-play golf, about sport, this isn’t the way it is going to go. It will take on connotations much wider, much darker, and much more reminiscent of the Olympic Games and World Cups of the 1930s.
(Sharp intake of breath!)
Deep down, really deep down, I get a very bad feeling about what is going to happen in Bethpage, and it will be the biggest test yet for a man called Luke Donald. His leadership, his captaincy, and indeed his life legacy, will be defined before this month is out.
It will be great TV. The Hunger Games always are.
Captains aren’t appointed, they are elected.
In a dressing room, in a boardroom, a captain is chosen by the group, explicitly or implicitly, because it’s usually so obvious who it should be. Official titles don’t matter. Leadership absolutely does.
One of the unfortunate things that has crept into youth sport in the last 20 years is the idea that everybody has a turn at being team captain for the day. Parents at the game have then been obliged to watch the shy kid forced into a role that he/she doesn’t really want, and likely will never enjoy. For every hidden “introvert leader” that is uncovered by this practice, there are ten traumatised-for-life children, forced to endure and remember the cruel comments from their team-mates (and their parents) who know the truth. And don’t hold back.
Every true leader, instead, has that natural aura, that presence, and interestingly it can come in many different sauces. You can be reserved and cerebral like a Mike Brearley, and still be as effective as the snarling Roy Keane.
Talent is indeed not enough for leadership. If it were, Ian Botham would have led English cricket for years, and no one would have ever heard of Mike Brearley. No, some people just aren’t meant to lead, and it’s usually not their fault. They have been promoted to a role beyond their abilities and will never meet the expectations of it.
Bruno is not the captain we expect.
– Roy Keane.
It’s not about the armband, it’s about what you represent.
Many, especially in these softer and gentler times, don’t agree with Roy Keane. Some people even think that a captain doesn’t matter at all, and that winning just depends on the total skill quotient available to the team on the day. For them, no intangible value is added from the person leading you into battle, with their charisma and passion.
It’s an opinion, but likely from someone who has never sat at any big table. Or in any serious locker-room.
Assessing teams like this, by just adding up the combined “talents” of its members, is comparable to judging the greatness of poetry following the formula of J Evans Pritchard, PhD.
Excrement.
The truth that you learn in life, eventually, is that the captain of the ship is the only real USP of any organisation; in politics, business or sport. At the elite end, our species is capable of extraordinary things, but you always need that one special person to emerge and inspire. They can change everything.
Maradona, for many, is a far greater player than Messi or Ronaldo because of just that. Convincing eternal losers like Napoli that he would take them to victories that they had never, ever envisaged; telling his teammates that they weren’t inferior. That they should believe.
All this stuff is really important, also way beyond sport. Listen to The Special One talk about his legendary Porto captain, recently passed away.
Remember that Jose was a very very young coach back then, with no footballing pedigree. A dressing-room of men eat people like that alive, unless someone tells them not to.
Jorge said what needed to be said before Mourinho even arrived, because he was a proper captain, and Mourinho cries today because he knows what he owes Jorge Costa.
It’s not about the armband, it’s about what you represent.
– Jose Mourinho.
The Elder Wand.
Giving someone the armband, a simple piece of cloth, means absolutely nothing in itself. Like the Elder Wand, it doesn’t really work until it finds its rightful owner.
The leader is the one who sets the culture, and, to quote Peter Drucker, “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Every single time.
This is why Manchester United is definitively doomed whilst owned by its current shareholders. Any team, any business, will not perform to its potential until the captain cloth sits around the right bicep. You can take that to the bank, and it is what all those captain-for-a-day youth coaches are missing.
The choice of a captain for the Ryder Cup has proven this in spades time and again, and will have a major impact on who actually wins on the Sunday evening. Nick Faldo was one of the greatest, most talented, golfers that Europe has ever produced, but he was a selfish individual and a horrendous captain. When he lost, heavily, no one was even surprised. Read here.
This job is really about motivating twelve golfers to think for three days more about their mates than their own individual score, and this goes completely against their muscle memory. The Americans, often with a more talented team, lose regularly because they just can’t get past this.
The right captain can shift that needle, getting heads where they need to be. Because this battle, the Ryder Cup, is really a mental test.
The Concession.
In golf, you never know how the day is going to pan out, and how playing partners will behave. Even the best players can get into a funk.
Many friendships have been damaged, if not totally lost, by banal decisions over whether an opponent needs to putt out. Wanting to see a two-footer finished off can be so annoying as to screw with the strongest mind:
“Finish it mate, that should be no problem right?”
This stuff is the adversarial match-play format of golf on which the Ryder Cup has been played for all of its 100-year history. [If you are interested in more details, read here] It is a key part of the entire culture of the sport, beating your man head-to head, and all of this ethos is explained so well in the glorious story and video of “The Concession”, here. (Watch it if you can; thank me later.)
Listen to the elegance and the decorum of Henry Longhurst, the commentator. Listen to the class of the protagonists.
We played the game in the spirit it was meant to be played. it wasn’t a war.
– Tony Jacklin.
Brian Huggett that very year thought he had won the Cup on another green with his clutch putt. He hadn’t, and the savage regret of that has never ever left him, because the Ryder Cup is the pinnacle, and that was his moment. Here, as an older man, he explains it all like no one else can. You can taste the pain.
This, dear readers, is the Ryder Cup. It is not the Sunday medal.
One needs a moment of pause after that video. Dust in the eye, over a familiar Spanish face.
“Seve showed me… sorry”.
The British and Irish golfers between 1947 and 1977 won the Ryder Cup only once, and the domination of the game by the Americans was such that the whole idea of the match was becoming difficult to sustain. There just was no competition, people were losing interest, and something required to be done. It needed fresh blood from Continental Europe, but golf outside the UK and Ireland, up until the mid-70s, was a very marginal sport, both in general participation and star players. All that changed with a certain Severiano Ballesteros.
It is always about leadership, and Europe found its true Captain Kirk 40 years ago.
Aura, charisma, flair, bravery, grit, ambition, vision, belief. Outlier talent. And very handsome, which always helps.
He went over to America and won big in their backyard. That was the signal, and he was the flag-bearer who created the entire European Tour, which was then almost immediately filled with players from all over the continent, all inspired by Seve.
Germans, Scandinavians, even Italians. And all the British lads who finally found their belief. Faldo, Woosnam, Lyle, to be followed by Clarke, Westwood, Casey, Rose, Donald and McIlroy.
All summed up in one phrase….
Seve showed me……sorry.
José María Olazábal.
Yes, he did. By the mid-80s, he had led the Europeans to dominance in the Ryder Cup.
He might not have worn the armband of captaincy in those early years, but he was the obvious leader. People “believed” because he told them to. What Roy Keane would call “the captain we expect.”
Europe just wouldn’t have won those trophies without Severiano Ballesteros, and Rory knows this to be completely true (at the 2 minute mark):
Seve died in 2011 at the absurdly young age of 54. The tributes in the golfing world, and in Spain, were many, and everyone who saw or met this man was touched by him.
Absolute box-office, with a perfect majestic swing, and more than a touch of class.
He spoke many other languages too: the dialects of honour, of dignity, of sportsmanship, of decency, of fair play, of loyalty, of integrity, and in the end, of dauntless, unforgettable, astonishing courage. Quite simply, there has never been a finer ambassador for either his sport or his country.
– The Irish Independent
The entire industry of European golf, the DP World Tour, the Ryder Cup, misses its spiritual father so so much.
O Captain! My Captain!
But now others need to stand tall.
The Jedi Luke.
Luke Donald does have something about him. One of these annoying people who seem to have everything, and succeed everywhere they go. A strong, confident personality, forged by cold Stranraer sea winds on his father’s side, and a Steiner school education in England. This is an intelligent, rounded winner of a man, with interests in wine-making and contemporary art. A successful marriage (to an American girl) and a picture-postcard close family.
Handsome bugger too.
All this describes what the Americans like to call “the right stuff”, as does Donald’s record as an elite golf professional, reaching Number 1 in the world.
Even his last-minute appointment three years ago to lead the European Ryder Cup team ended in overwhelming success. He made it all look like a stroke of outrageous good fortune for the European PGA, beating the Americans comfortably in Rome, with flawless preparation and gravitas. Luke Donald is a proven leader for sure, but his greatest challenge in life now awaits him.
What kind of captain will he be under intense pressure, MAGA antagonism? This is his Waterloo, and we shall soon see how he performs when really tested.
When he is 2-0 down in Turin against an elite Juventus.
Tell me again that a captain doesn’t matter!
Lead them well, Luke. It’s not so important that you win, but it’s crucial you behave in the way your sport expects. The very future of the Ryder Cup may depend on your decorum.
Take the high road.
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