Team USA made an impressive Sunday afternoon comeback to defeat Great Britain and Ireland in the Walker Cup matches two weeks ago. The Walker Cup is a two day competition between 10 man teams made up of amateur golfers. The women amateurs play next year in the Curtis Cup. Next Friday through Sunday the top female professional golfers from America take on their counterparts from Europe in the Solheim Cup. Team Europe is going for a three peat next Sunday and is on home turf in Andalusia, Spain. This will mark the 18th edition of the Solheim which was the brainchild of the president of PING Golf, Karsten Solheim. It features teams of 12 top notch professionals.
We also happen to be just two weeks removed from golf’s Ryder Cup, a 12 man professional team event between Team USA and Europe. Outside of golf’s four majors, the Ryder Cup is the game’s most pressure packed week of tournament golf. The American squad regained the Ryder Cup two years ago at the Whistling Straits Golf Course in Wisconsin by a most imposing score of 19-9. While Team USA has the greater collection of top golfers according to the Official World Golf Rankings, there is a proverbial elephant in the room this time around. The last time the American squad won on foreign soil was way back in 1993, a hard to believe 30 years ago. The 2023 edition of the Ryder Cup will be contested at the Marco Simone Golf Club in Italy. Can the American squad break through with an away victory, or will they revert to three decades of futility against European teams that have historically been weaker on paper? We will explore those myriad of possibilities next week, but for now we want to take a look back at close to 100 years of Ryder Cup history and how all this has come to pass.
Golf was a very parochial game following the conclusion of World War I. American professional golfers traveled the country by car and the vast majority of them made their real money by serving as golf professionals at highly regarded private country clubs. There was no European Tour in the 1920s but there was a small circuit for professionals who competed throughout the United Kingdom. Air travel was greatly limited and the only way a top notch pro could cross the ocean to compete in either the British Open or the United States Open was via ship. Those journeys took in excess of one week depending upon the weather and the prevailing winds. It wasn’t worth the time, the effort, or the money to compete on the other side of the Atlantic.
The advent of that first Ryder Cup at the Worcester Country Club in Massachusetts in 1927 was seen as a way to get the top British golfers to come to America prior to the U.S. Open and to do so in England two years later prior to the British Open. Top golfers of the era such as Walter Hagen and Gene Sarazen had that added incentive to make the ocean journey since they were going to be involved in two top notch competitions. It was all about honor and glory combined with a sensible travel schedule.
That second Ryder Cup was contested at Moortown Golf Club in England and the cup matches were a big hit from the start. It was also a very balanced competition as the home team was the victor in each of those initial five Ryder Cups. Sad to say the Ryder Cup would go into hibernation following the 1937 matches at the Southport and Ainsdale Golf Club in England due to the impending hostilities that would lead to World War II. It would be 10 long years before the seventh biennial matches would resume in 1947 at Portland Country Club in Oregon. Yet while the matches resumed in the post-war era, the competitive balance was decidedly out of whack as Team USA was 14-1-1 over the course of the next 16 matches between 1947 and 1977. The early portion of those matches was the heyday of America’s golfing trio of Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, and Byron Nelson while the 1960s and 1970s featured American stars such as Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Lee Trevino, Billy Casper, and Julius Boros.
Three time Ryder Cup golfer and former Lake County resident Johnny Pott once told me that he and his American teammates barely knew their British counterparts. The Brits seldom traveled to America, even to play in the majors, and there was a decided imbalance in the talent level. It wasn’t a fair fight as there was still no European Tour of note and the Americans were competing for close to 30 weeks in America. Only a few up and coming English golfers like Tony Jacklin played in America and excelled on the PGA Tour.
It was after those 1977 matches that Jack Nicklaus made a presentation to the Ryder Cup committee to consider expanding the Great Britain and Ireland team to include all of continental Europe. Nicklaus wanted to enhance competitive balance, and most importantly, the best golfer on the other side of the pond at that time was a dynamic Spanish golfer by the name of Seve Ballesteros. The 1979 edition of the Ryder Cup was contested at the Greenbrier in West Virginia, and although Team USA won once again, the matches were starting to tighten up. Team USA won the 1983 Ryder Cup by a nail biting one point margin of victory and Ballesteros was joined by a whole new breed of European golfers including Nick Faldo, Sandy Lyle, Ian Woosnam, German Bernhard Langer, and Spaniard Jose Maria Olazabal. All of the aforementioned were world class golfers and all six of them would don the green jacket as champions of the Masters golf tournament during their extensive careers.
Europe broke through with a Ryder Cup win at the Belfry in England in 1985 and then shocked the Americans and their captain, Jack Nicklaus, with an away win at Muirfield Village in Ohio, a world class course designed by Nicklaus and site of the PGA Tour’s Memorial Tournament. Team USA won back-to-back in 1991 and 1993, Europe prevailed with two in a row in 1995 and 1997, and then the script flipped from the early days. Team Europe would always win at home, and even though they may not have been the best team on paper, they pulled off upset winds on American soil at such iconic courses as Oak Hill, Oakland Hills, and Medinah, all past U.S. Open and PGA Championship sites. Since 2014 the home team has always prevailed.
All of which brings us to the 2023 Ryder Cup in Italy in two weeks. The Euros are familiar with the course at Marco Simone as it has served as the site of their tour’s Italian Open. While Team USA did make a field trip to Italy last week, playing practice rounds for several days has little to compare with the competitive juices of the Italian Open let alone the pressure packed nature of a Ryder Cup. Captains Luke Donald of Europe and Zach Johnson of America have their 12 man squads locked into place and ready to go. America is better on paper, Europe is dynamic at home, and we will soon be ready to watch golf’s most dynamic series of team matches.
