A number of Europe’s triumphant and bleary-eyed heroes will be on Scottish soil this week for the celebrity-infused grin-athon that is the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship.
Compared to the overwhelming bearpit of Bethpage Park, the trip to the relative serenity of the cradle of the game will be akin to checking in at a monastic retreat.
Forget all those hooting, hollering and heckling MAGA louts. It’ll be more a case of Make Audiences Genteel Again.
But back to the tumult of the Ryder Cup. The 45th edition of this great transatlantic tussle had just about everything. Not all of it was good, of course.
Behavior of American fans deemed reprehensible
The relentless, predictable and well-documented abuse directed at European players, for instance, was exhausting, expletive-ridden and excruciatingly awful.
The feral frat-boy repartee was so basic, it made the primitive grunts and snorts of the cavemen sound like the soaring oratory of some of the world’s most eloquent communicators.
If barmy Brookline in 1999 saw the arrival of the golf hooligan, then Bethpage in 2025 built on that lamentable legacy.
In an age when the marketing folk of sporting showpieces urge all and sundry to ‘bring the noise’ while flames are fanned with snarling sales pitches and jingoistic rallying cries, you reap what you sow. Let’s calm it all down, eh?
As Rory McIlroy said, “Golf teaches you etiquette, it teaches you how to play by the rules, it teaches you how to respect people.”
Hopefully, a few lessons are learned.
With Donald as captain, Euros have a plan
The Europeans are savoring a first win on U.S. soil since 2012, while Team U.S., despite a valiant singles surge that proved once again that they work better as individuals rather than a collective unit, will embark on another sombre post-mortem.
Goodness knows what the yins of the PGA of America will do next in their ongoing quest to find a recipe for success. Pay the players more, perhaps?
After the nostalgia-driven and ultimately disastrous appointment of Tom Watson as skipper back in 2014, they set up an instantly mockable Task Force to spearhead a fresh approach.
But that seemed to fall by the wayside and, out of the blue for 2025, they just phoned Keegan Bradley and asked him to be captain after Tiger Woods declined the opportunity.
They’ll probably give President Donald Trump a tinkle to see if he fancies it for 2027?
As for Team Europe? Well, it’s another Donald they trust.
In Luke Donald, they have a captain who has now been elevated into such a shimmering pantheon he’ll probably spend the next few weeks standing on a marble plinth as passers-by kneel in humble reverence.
Under the ceaseless gaze of fevered analysis, loads of attention centers around what those captains do or don’t do at a Ryder Cup even though the 24 players involved will do things that the captains will not want them to do but will do it anyway because the very nature of golf means that you can easily do things you don’t mean to do even though you’re trying your best to do the things you want to do and not the things you don’t want to do. Fair dos?
It can be a fickle business of very fine margins. But hats off to diligent Donald.
This is a man, after all, whose staggering attention to detail led to him changing the shampoos in the team’s Long Island hotel rooms because the original ones weren’t fragrant enough. Blimey.
For a long time in the European Ryder Cup set-up, there was the kind of assumed line of succession that you’d get with a Royal family.
The disruptive, divisive emergence of LIV, and the subsequent defection to the Saudi-backed series of a whole host of players with Ryder Cup captaincy credentials, like Lee Westwood, Sergio Garcia, Ian Poulter and Graeme McDowell, put something of a spanner in those works.
Henrik Stenson was appointed captain for Rome in 2023 but was effectively sacked when he too jumped on board the LIV gravy train.
Donald stepped into the role at relatively short notice. And he’s gone on to become one of Europe’s greatest captains by winning home and away.
It has been one positive, if unintentional, consequence of the LIV rebellion.
Will Donald stay on for a third term, then? He’s certainly earned the right to. Equally, you wouldn’t blame him for stepping aside and basking in the glow of a glorious tenure.
As the US rake over the debris of another loss, the winning Europeans raise a glass to cohesion, continuity and camaraderie.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?
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