From its cheerleading Wags to its co-ordinated dress code, the rites and rituals of the Ryder Cup are very much its own
FORMER RYDER CUP captain Mark James drolly observed in 1991: “The only thing that scares me about the Americans is their dress sense.” Hallelujah. But James had also touched on an issue growing with each staging of the competition.
The Ryder Cup is more than a golf event. It’s a social scene, a glamour pageant. James wasn’t kidding and when in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq, Corey Pavin and Steve Pate arrived to the “War on the Shore” at Kiawa Island wearing combat-chic peaked caps for the Saturday fourball, Europe took a deep breath. America were “manning up”.
While they escaped the traditional default choice of the Glenmuir woollen or the Pringle spangle pattern – the most beloved brand of golfing fashion victims – Pavin and Pate were merely firming up the belief that golf and co-ordinated dressing was like footballers and fidelity. You go along with a relationship for a few years and then when it gets a little boring, you have an affair and the camouflage baseball cap turns out to be the fashion equivalent of an escort girl.
When you lock 12 high achievers into a room every two years and call them a team, you tend to end up with the kind of decisions that seem like a good idea at the time. Golfers don’t really know how to do team, how to behave team, how to be team.
They remember things they saw in high school or on television and then they get their Wags to do it too, right along beside them. In the minger-free zone that is the Wag parade, a group of tastefully attired cheerleaders, we wonder how Tiger will cope this year. And Monty. And Thomas Bjorn.
All have found to their cost that no amount of staid red V-necks or navy slacks will put off the tabloid press from chasing the dirt in their private lives: their girlfriends, their children with other women, their cocktail waitress associates. Ryder Cup golfers, welcome to the new intrusive, distasteful, grubby reality.
Tiger’s ex wife, Elin, was made for Wagdom and some concern centres on that gaping hole when they all line up in that made-for-mockery pageant. Admiring their men is a tough business. At the K Club, Elin went beyond the call of Wag duty and loyally followed Tiger around a rain-soaked course. When a Dublin magazine printed a nude photograph with her head superimposed Tiger roared; the effrontery of the upstarts humiliating her in that way.
Tiger once, when he had no steady girlfriend, brought his mummy to join the team of Sideshow Bobs. Sergio too. Mrs Woods and Mrs Garcia, both in designer gear lined up in what is a curious inversion of the typical sports etiquette where wives and girlfriends are banished from the background during tournaments.
Boxers avoid partner contact for weeks before a fight, a deprivation said to drive them crazy with aggression. But in the Ryder Cup the Wags attend the formal dinners at night and the planned excursions during the day and when the tournament begins they also reliably give good close-up tension shots for television.
When hubby is hot-wired to a 12ft putt and the match hangs on it, cut to wife nibbling her fingers and clutching at least one other from Team Wag.
Four years after Kiawa, the “Brookline Bust Up” assumed more war-like characteristics. When Justin Leonard jammed in his impossibly long scud on the 17th hole and the celebrating American team exploded European hopes by stampeding over José María Olazábal’s putting line, UN negotiators couldn’t have smoothed the rancour.
It wasn’t so much the breach of etiquette – hey there are no rules in a war, right? – but what the American team were wearing. Described as a collection of motel prints on a sea of burgundy, some fashionistas took grave enough exception to also blame the shirts for 9/11.
Ryder Cup has long been a byword for some heavy sartorial static and the competition also seems wedded to the idea of smart and tidy. Ryder Cup players compete to a man, tucked in, and from experience we know that playing golf “tucked in” when over the age of 40 is a visual affront. The prosperous tummy of Miguel Ángel Jiménez will soon illustrate that point, although the Spaniard breaks the traditional convention that there are few truly cool dudes in golf.
In a game that strangles eccentrics and rewards predictability and repetition, Jiménez is the swinger you don’t see with perspiration spreading from his waistband. He’s the Spaniard who can pull off impossible combinations such as his yellow ponytail and ginger moustache, and who brings his Cuban cigars wherever he goes.
At Valhalla in 2008, his team room requirements were some decent bottles of Rioja and a humidor, a choice the Americans would see as scarily European.
The captain that year, Nick Faldo, employed the third of his three wives, a former Swiss PR agent, Valerie Bercher to work on the group’s wardrobe with leading Irish designer Paul Costelloe.
American cool arrives in the shape of quarter Japanese 21-year-old Rickie Fowler. His tufts of unkempt glossy locks that lick out from under his funky Puma painter’s cap and the orange jumpsuit he saves for the final day’s play challenge the Ian Poulters of this Ryder Cup world.
Of course they will all be in team uniform but Fowler works hard on appearing not to try, while Poulter remains that little bit stylistically forced.
Fowler connects with today’s youngest. He’s got an X-Games kind of appeal with a derring-do style of play developed in a motocross background. What they’ll make of him in Newport, who knows?
The fresh-faced Californian is a Bubba Watson length drive away from captain Ian Woosnam’s lasting image from the banks of the Liffey in Kildare in 2006. On the balcony of the K Club as Europe celebrated wildly, Woosey downed a pint in 10 seconds and moments later what looked like a Galway Bay oyster glooped out of his nose. A moment to remember. Not a stylish finish to the Ryder Cup, an event guaranteed to take even the hardened professionals out of their comfort zones.
