So the Ryder Cup has found its perfect storm. Not in the confluence of Welsh climate and Welsh topography that washed out the opening day's play. Not even in the scheduling of the tournament for the first week of October, its latest start since 1967. But rather, and most critically, in the combination of arrogance and greed that brought all those other factors together.
Money talks - and not just in a Welsh accent either. On the other side of the Atlantic, organisers of the US Tour had long grumbled about the fact their season tended to peter out after the PGA Championship in August, so they instituted the FedEx Cup, an ungainly play-off series whose deficiencies are of no great note to players who tend to concentrate only on the $35 million prize fund. This year's winner was Jim Furyk, who trousered the immodest first prize of $10m only last weekend.Which is where the problem really lies. The Ryder Cup is trumpeted as one of the world's greatest sporting events largely because it pits the finest players of Europe and America against each other for nothing more than honour. Yet its place in the greater scheme of things is really as an afterthought, something to be dealt with after the money has been made. And the more money they want to make, the later and later it goes.Can common sense prevail? The fact of the matter is that organisers of the Ryder Cup cannot credibly carry on parading its merits as the ultimate Corinthian contest while continuing to undermine its integrity with crackpot scheduling. And if all their worthy speeches about the great game of golf and about bringing youngsters into the sport are to be remembered as anything other than empty rhetoric, then they have to give the event the priority it deserves.Their failure to do that has already undermined this year's competition. Yes, some of the golf on display at Celtic Manor has been riveting. And yes, the individual battles have had as much drama as anyone could ask for. But the 2010 tournament has been critically compromised by the need to rip up the original schedule and turn the new format into a desperate race against time and the fading light of shorter autumn days. Frankly, it deserves much better than this.It was the culmination of a contest not just between Scotland and Wales, the only two credible candidates in the bid process at the time, but also between the Professional Golfers' Association, the traditional owners of the Ryder Cup, and the European Tour. The Tour supplied the players for the event, but its officials had long made clear their dissatisfaction with an arrangement that effect-ively gave the PGA the major say in the running of the tournament and the major slice of its proceeds. The choice of Wales, and a course owned by the millionaire host of an existing Tour event, was a clear signal that the power balance had changed for all time.As the weather forecasters trotted out their gloomy - and mostly accurate - predictions last week, the mind wandered back to 2001 and the sequence of events that led to the Ryder Cup coming to Wales. The stuccoed and castellated premises of Wentworth Golf Club provided the suitably overblown setting for the announcement that Sir Terry Matthews, or rather his cheque book, had persuaded the European Tour authorities that Celtic Manor would host this year's event.
Senior sources within the European Tour have suggested that an even later date has been proposed for the Gleneagles Ryder Cup in 2014, but First Minister Alex Salmond indicated yesterday that a slot in September is the preferred option as far as he is concerned. "But it's for the tours to decide," Salmond added. We have to hope that they actually learn their lesson from this year's washout in Wales.
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