The last three European Tour events have now been won by three different European Ryder Cup team members. With Padraig Harrington’s victory in Germany this weekend (congratulations to him), Luke Donald’s last week, and Miguel Angel Jimenez’s victory two weeks ago, not to mention the numerous top ten finishes by European Ryder Cuppers in these three events, the confidence within the European team must be sky high.
How much this will matter come Ryder Cup weekend remains to be seen. Firstly, golf is one of those games in which form can vanish as quickly as it arrives – this week’s hero can easily be next week’s villain. Secondly, home advantage counts for a lot – maybe not so much as it did in, say, 1991 (“The War on the Shore”) or 1999 (“The War on the Line of Jose Maria Olazabal’s Crucial Putt”), thanks to a renewed (and welcomed) spirit of competition and heightened security measures, but still enough to have an effect on the attitude and mindset of the players, and ultimately the final outcome. Thirdly, this is the Ryder Cup; form, confidence and nerve can all go out of the window in the pressure-cooker environment that this event generates, especially in the singles matches.
Much as Major Championships don’t really start until the back nine on Sunday, the Ryder Cup doesn’t really start until the first singles victory is chalked up on Sunday. From then on it’s usually pure drama, with the non-stop excitement of holed bunker shots, missed putts, blue squares turning red and red squares turning blue, until, eventually, some poor brave soul is faced with the deciding putt, the single stroke down to which all the previous hours, weeks and months of hype is boiled in a glorious manifestation of reductionism, its ultimate fate also being that of two teams of twelve golfers, each representing entire continents.
There have been no runaway winners during the “European Era” (i.e. since the non-American team has comprised continental Europeans as well as golfers from Great Britain and Ireland), and I see this trend continuing. Although it is almost inevitable that the match will come down to the last three or four pairings, it is the unpredictability and tension of these final few matches that makes the Ryder Cup what it is – one of the world’s greatest sporting spectacles.