#rydercup #golf #ping #taylormade #callaway #titleist #wilsonstaff #maxfli #golfchannel #nikegolf #pga #mizuno #golfdigest The Sunday newspapers are a long-standing UK institution that actually provides a very revealing snapshot of the national zietgiest. It’s possibly not inappropriate in the run up to the Ryder Cup now to give you a peep of some of the musings detected this weekend. The spectrum covers a range. At the lowest-end we have ‘tabloids’. Here we find pages full of facile celestial bodies designed to appeal to readers obsessed with vacuous celebrities, or should that be vacuous readers. Throw in a heady mix of high-octane football, and a good television section and that’s your formula. The mid-range tends to the territory of reactionary tabloids who, no longer able to report news in real time due to the advent of social media, have adopted the tactic of trying to manage our emotional reaction to a story that offends our sense of moral outrage instead. Invariably this means taking an extreme example of something and using it to inflame populist opinion in the hope of converting this into electoral votes for their political party of endorsed choice. Finally we have the good old quality end of the market, the ‘broadsheet’. The broadsheets mire themselves in pontificating about the dominant global crisis of the day, (invariably from a reflected position of moral superiority you understand) whilst rarely missing the opportunity to engage in political intrigue. Some of the most desperate and tortured contributions are reserved for the broadsheets sports pages however, and this is where we want to park. It is here that you find the truly deluded denizens. Dependent on the season, journalists and readers alike agonise on how to restore the fortunes of England’s football or cricket team to a level of prestige that they’ve previously held in the imagination of those who believe such folly is still possible. Despite all the evidence pointing to this being a futile exercise, it has none the less become something of a harmless national past-time bordering on obsession for decades as one generation passes the baton to another, who in turn will pose, and fail to answer, the same questions those which went before them. This weekend however we saw golf momentarily enter the mincing machine that churns out copy, and posed the question about American antipathy to the once competitive and keenly contested Ryder Cup. “The wider debate surrounds whether or not a US victory is required to stimulate the Ryder Cup. From 1995 onwards, United States teams have won twice, leading to speculation that the Ryder Cup has regressed into more of a formality than need to be the case. Americans after all, don’t tend to buy into sporting occasions they believe they have little chance of winning” – The Observer, 8/31/14 There have been whisperings ever since Paul McGinlay was installed as Captain and the PGA Centenary course at Gleneagles selected to host, that dark forces were working towards a US victory. We’re not convinced that Europe has set out to lose though. As regards the rest, there might be something in it. I’m not completely au-fait with television viewing figures stateside, but am given to understand that tennis dropped off a cliff within half of a generation post Sampras and Agassi? The same has happened in heavyweight boxing and track and field. There might be something to the notion that America only plays if she can win, but then isn’t this the cultural manifestation of an incredibly domestic facing sporting landscape. Ironically golf, through the Ryder Cup in particular, is one of the few events where America participates in international team sport with a good chance of winning. In many respects it is the USP that perhaps the PGA needs to generate interest in the forthcoming post Tiger era. If the holy-grail is success rather than participation, then a series of closely fought US wins should easily see viewing figures restored regardless of whether Tiger Woods was involved. It’s well documented that a number of Ryder Cup tickets have been made available late in the day too. These are ‘returns’, but it’s not clear if they’re corporate or PGA allocations. Depends who you believe, but we’re tending to the former explanation. The last stats we saw suggested that America was still the second biggest market for sales, albeit we’d like to give a shout out to non-competing countries like Canada and Australia who both made the top-six. Credit to both of them. Come to think of it, we have social media platforms with approximately 9000 followers/ fans etc a majority of whom are American. Yet we can’t find a single one of them prepared to venture an opinion as to who they’d pick as their wildcards? That can’t be healthy, although I doubt that we’re a true barometer as to the mood of the nation. We’re actually weighing up the merits of writing a piece on the subject of what America needs to do in order to start winning the Ryder Cup again, as some of the solutions are pretty transparent to us sitting here a few orbits removed from the epicentre. Such an article however means taking the reader into some areas that our tentative forays so far have led us to believe they’d rather not go. Well if we’re going to commit our views to this we really ought to do so before the result is known. If America wins then, hey, we might look stupid, but at least we put up ahead of the outcome. Anyone can write articles after time from the comfort of a known result, we want to be a little bit edgier than that surely?
Posted on: Mon, 01 Sep 2014 17:13:27 +0000
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