In two weeks’ time it’s the Ryder Cup “year-to-go” celebrations.
Captains Paul McGinley and Tom Watson are taking a steam train from Edinburgh to Gleneagles Halt and spending two days winding up the hype to fever pitch with 52 weeks still to be negotiated before a ball is struck in anger.
The cup is so supremely important financially to the European Tour chief executive George O’Grady is on record saying there wouldn’t be a tour without it so you can understand the frenzy about Gleneagles 2014, at least a little. In addition, EventScotland have their hands on the biggest sporting event to hit Scotland since the Champions League Final of 2002 probably bigger than that, and they’re going to make the most out of it in terms of promotion.
But several of the various staging posts or “hurdles” as European captain Paul McGinley calls them – to be cleared ahead of next year appear to be rather manufactured.
Witness the start of the points race to make Europe’s Gleneagles team which began at the ISPS Handa Wales Open. This event will be the starting venue for the qualification process for the next few editions of the Cup, part of the deal brokered when mobile mogul Terry Mathews “bought” the Cup for Wales in 2010.
We in the media duly quizzed McGinley about this “important” staging post on the Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday of the Johnnie Walker at Gleneagles, and then he was asked about it on Tuesday and Wednesday when he got to Celtic Manor.
But despite all this, in reality the first event is not that significant at all. It’s the first step in a year-long marathon, arguably the LEAST important one, and indeed the standard of the field at Celtic Manor suggests the top players were more concerned chasing plentiful $$$$ in the FedEx Cup than getting a fast start.
Most Ryder Cup qualification points are going to be won in big-order events like the majors, the WGCs, the new Closing Series events of the Tour and next year’s events like the Desert Swing and the BMW PGA. I reckon you could probably get a reasonably sporting bet on NONE of the players present at Celtic Manor making the European team in a year’s time.
In the meantime there’s going to be some debate about the set-up of the PGA Centenary Course over the next few months, particularly as, no doubt to McGinley’s instruction, it played very differently in the Johnnie Walker this time to previous years. But again, this is a debate that really doesn’t amount to very much.
In 2002, certainly, Sam Torrance’s decision to have additional rough grown at the Belfry took a bigger-hitting American team out of their comfort zone, perhaps even decisively. But the days when the US massively out-muscle Europe have long gone.
Last year at Medinah Davis Love III slashed back the rough to virtually nothing and tried to turn it into a putting competition. As McGinley pointed out last week, this worked really well for two days, but it couldn’t stop the Miracle from occurring.
Matchplay, in itself, sort of renders the course and set-up irrelevant. It would have been nice had the Ryder Cup been played on the classic links of these islands the last four Europe home games, but it certainly wasn’t necessary.
The drama of the Belfry, K Club, Celtic Manor and hopefully Gleneagles all of them manufactured modern layouts built to largely American-style specifications – confirms that you could play the Ryder Cup just about anywhere and still get a spectacle.
The hype really generates from the matches. I can’t wait for them, but somebody wake me up when it all gets started.