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GAJTKA: Despite Some Bethpage Ugliness, The Ryder Cup Still Rules

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5 months ago

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Cam Young celebrates his winning putt in Sunday singles. (RYDER CUP USA)

I started writing something totally different from this until about 3 p.m. Sunday.

That’s about when Cam Young and Justin Thomas made birdies on the 18th hole at Bethpage Black, locking up wins in the first two Sunday singles matches when each could have easily gone the other way — results that would have allowed Europe to retain the Ryder Cup before most of us had digested lunch.

Instead, the Americans put together the best singles session since this event became United States vs. Europe in 1979, earning 8 1/2 points and losing just one match of the 11 contested.

Prior to that genuinely stunning development, I was performing all sorts of mental gymnastics, trying to figure out if the Ryder Cup was broken.

Do we need to make this Europe vs. the World? Should there be more matches, like the Presidents Cup? Fewer points at stake, to keep it closer? Should it be played at a neutral site, to mitigate ugly crowd involvement like Saturday?

I hate to be a prisoner of the moment, but Sunday was a good reminder that this thing — while unruly, inefficient and in the case of the ‘envelope rule,’ archaic — still delivers drama like no other event on the golf calendar. Even when Sunday seems like a snooze, there’s always a moment when you can talk yourself into the possibility of a comeback.

This time, there was a lot more than one moment, to the point that you could argue the Europeans somehow both blew the Cup and stole it back on the same afternoon. Just ask Russell Henley, who’s going to be thinking about leaving two extremely holeable match-winning putts right in the jaws.

Instead, Henley’s Sunday combatant Shane Lowry stepped up and delivered the Cup-clinching moment, lifting Europe to its ninth win in 12 tries this century.

Now, I’m not going to ignore the obvious. Europe is just better at this. The USA has a lot of thinking to do about how they can better position their players to perform as well as their counterparts do.

But, I’m happy to report that the Ryder Cup as an entertainment entity still rules.

There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth over what some drunk fans were up to on Saturday, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that part of what we love about the Ryder Cup is that it’s different from the usual tour stop — and I’m talking PGA Tour and LIV and whatever else you might watch for the 103 weeks between Cup matchups.

It’s difficult to replicate the passion of an international athletic event, even if one of the ‘nations’ is actually a conglomeration based on geographic proximity. In a sport that is increasingly more mercenary, the Ryder Cup is refreshing in its patriotic approach.

“Y’know, that last bit there where we were making a run, I don’t know about any of you guys, but I haven’t felt anything like that playing golf before,” Young said in the post-match press conference.

“I mean, that was truly unbelievable to watch one after the other just start making putts, fighting the way that they did. I’ve never seen anything like that, and I’ve never felt anything like that watching golf, playing golf, doesn’t matter.”

Again, we all have standards for what we think is fair game in terms of heckling. (Personally, I think it’s a silly thing to do, but I also don’t believe in legislating or trying to police things a tiny minority of people in a crowd are doing.) The biggest issue for me as a golf fan is I don’t want someone outside the competition to distract the competitors while they’re swinging the club.

In that way, I admire the Saturday work of Justin Thomas and Young, who volunteered themselves as de facto marshals when the angry crowd refused to shut up for the swings of Rory McIlroy and Shane Lowry.

“I don’t think anybody’s safety was necessarily in danger,” Thomas said. “Words hurt, too. There were definitely some nasty things said, but I don’t think anybody was fearing for their life or in a situation where they were going to get hurt. But anybody that was out there could blatantly tell you there were some things said.

“Cam and I said to Shane and Rory yesterday that we felt for them. Cam and I just wished that we gave (fans) something to cheer for instead of people to cheer against. I think that was kind of the main consensus of the last two days, that we weren’t giving them enough to cheer for, and they were just trying to help us win.”

It’s also worth noting that, for all the talk of boorish fans, it was ironic that it was the players and caddies who nearly came to blows. And even that Saturday simmering boiled and blew over in the time it takes walk from green to tee.

That conciliatory tone carried over to Sunday, when Scottie Scheffler’s caddy Ted Scott posted a video alongside Francesco Molinari in which the well-known looper apologized to the Team Europe assistant captain.

And then, lo and behold, after the final singles matches, the two teams engaged in what’s believed to be a Ryder Cup first: A post-match handshake line on the 18th green that mirrored the National Hockey League’s longtime playoff tradition.

All’s well that ends well? Not entirely. There’s no forgiving the fan, for instance, who threw a drink at McIlroy and his wife Erica on Saturday. It didn’t land, but it should mean a ban from golf events for life for that particular Team USA partisan.

On the whole, though, I have a hard time saying I wasn’t held at full attention when the Ryder Cup came down to (literally) the short strokes. I’m not about to let a few dummies distract from this fact: There are few sports properties that deliver like this.

The biggest shame remains that we have to wait two years for another dose of the Ryder Cup drug.

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A 15-year veteran of sports media, Matt Gajtka (GITE-kah) is the founding editor of PGN. Matt is a lifelong golfer with a passion for all aspects of the sport, from technique to courses to competition. His experience ranges from reporting on Pittsburgh's major-league beats, to broadcasting a variety of sports, to public relations, multimedia production and social media.