In a fascinating presentation to the GAA’s coaching conference five years ago, Paul McGinley explained how, as Ryder Cup captain, he turned a disparate bunch of self-centred sports people into a pop-up team, for a week.
He didn’t use any of those terms exactly, but that is the bald challenge every Ryder Cup captain faces: convincing sole traders to form some kind of company, where the only possible dividend is glory, and the ‘I’ in ‘team’ is silent, mostly.
Just like in any successful team, McGinley was reaching for a sense of identity. In this case it was Team Europe, a needs-must concept rustled up in the late 1970s to save the Ryder Cup from obsolescence.
McGinley understood the absurdity of harbouring passionate feelings for a continent, so he stressed to the players that “we’re not here just representing a place with a faceless blue flag – that Europe is”.
In an attempt to make it meaningful, he reduced identity to its boiled-down essence. When every player checked in to their hotel room for the 2014 matches in Gleneagles they found photographs of the village or town or city they hailed from.
Under the Team Europe jersey was this vest, close to their skin; they were representing home, wherever that was.
“What I was trying to do,” said McGinley, “was engage their hearts.”
But in another sense, that still acknowledged their differences. On Team Europe that year were players from nine different nationalities. How do you create chemistry in that kind of environment?
McGinley was smart. He didn’t fire all of these individuals into a pot and hope to make a stew; he knew that he was dealing with plates of sushi.
“You had 12 players,” he said, “brought up with an individual mindset. You can’t just turn them into the best team-mate in the world . . . I wanted to empower the individual mindset.”
His approach generated an interesting response. Instead of insisting that the team ate together he organised a buffet that ran from 5 o’clock until 10.30 in the evening and he told the players they could eat whenever they wanted, with whomever they wanted.
The team room was set up for group activities, or simply lounging around, but McGinley told the players they were free to go where they wished in the evenings: head to the movies, meet other people outside the hotel, the kind of things they might do on a regular week on tour.
What he noticed was that, in the absence of directives from the captain, the players chose to spend more time in each other’s company as the week wore on. Organically, they came together.
All of the powerful imagery and subliminal messaging that McGinley created in the team room, and on the Team Europe floor in the hotel, contributed to the atmosphere, but all of it would have been hollow unless the players made connections, however brief.
You wonder what Luke Donald has been thinking about all this. How will he pull them together? The qualification process concludes in two months, and with six captain’s picks, Donald has some decisions to make, though not many. It wouldn’t be a surprise if 10 of the names are locked in already in his mind.
The dynamic for Europe’s captain has changed, though, not just because of LIV Golf, and the violent upheaval it caused, but because of other tectonic shifts in the professional game. The tour that Team Europe is supposed to represent no longer holds the attention of most of the players who will be wearing the jumper in September.
They feel a certain attachment because this is where they started, and earned their spurs, but the economics of the global game now are such that the best European players eventually become too big for their home tour.
The European Tour is not even called that any more. Of the 44 events listed on this year’s DP World Tour schedule, only 18 are being staged in Europe. All of Europe’s best players are based in the United States because the prize money and world ranking points are far more bountiful over there.
The big money events on the DP World Tour are scheduled for times in the year when the PGA Tour is low-key, and the American exiles can cross the Atlantic to meet the very generous conditions of their DP World Tour membership. Without that, they can’t play in the Ryder Cup. If the Ryder Cup didn’t exist, how often would they leave America?
It used to be said that European players, among other things, were playing “for the honour of the tour,” but nobody says that anymore; it would be ludicrous. The days when Team Europe travelled together on Concorde from Heathrow for Ryder Cups in America are consigned to sepia-tinted memory.
On McGinley’s team in 2014, nobody played fewer than 14 tournaments on the European Tour that season. To retain membership of the tour back then, 13 was the required minimum. Granted, that included the Majors and the co-sanctioned WGC events. But still. About half of the team would have been regarded as European Tour players, first and foremost. None of the others were strangers to these shores.
This year? Of the DP World Tour regulars, Yannick Paul from Germany is currently in an automatic qualifying spot. Adrian Meronk from Poland will probably make the team, one way or another. Otherwise it will be a host of familiar names from the PGA Tour. That’s why Donald has six picks.
Between 1995 and 2018, Europe won nine Ryder Cups from 12 attempts. Time after time the world rankings would say that the USA had the stronger team, but the outcome would say that Europe’s players were better at pulling together.
In Paris, for example, the USA was such an unhappy camp that they organised a two-day “bonding” session before the 2021 event in Wisconsin. In their press conferences that week, every US player spoke about friendships in the group, and how well they were getting on, as if they desperately needed to project an image of unity and harmony. Could you believe it? If it was half-true, for a few days, would that be enough?
In Rome, Team Europe will need all the chemistry they can muster. McGinley knew that he couldn’t take that for granted. Remember Nick Faldo’s captaincy? Most of these guys are not team players by nature. Donald will need to come up with something. Can’t wait.
