Team match play; more fun to watch

Alternate shot; still the best of all

This time last week the President’s Cup was evenly balanced. On Saturday it reverted to type with the US opening up an almost insurmountable four point lead. Next day there were a few fleeting moments when the scoreboard suggested the Internationals had a chance of cutting this deficit by a point or two, though they never looked like actually winning. In the end the gap widened still further and the final result was disappointingly familiar.

On reflection, however, the margin of this tenth consecutive victory was perhaps not quite so overwhelming as it appeared. A curious statistic is that over the four days the US only won one more hole than the Internationals - 117 to 116. Where the US superiority was most marked was the ability of so many of its players to close matches out.

Thirteen matches went to the last hole and another seven finished on the seventeenth. Of these twenty the US won twelve and halved (or, if we must, “tied”) three. The Internationals, who were not helped by a bizarre decision to send out unchanged pairings on Saturday afternoon after a drubbing in the morning, only mustered five wins from these twenty tight games.

There was also something slightly eccentric in staging what was supposed to be, from the American viewpoint, the “away” match, at a course which was closer to the homes of the most of the US team than those of the Internationals.

Maybe, however, the calls for the International teams to be boosted by bringing in Europeans are premature. Undoubtedly the inclusion from 1983 onwards of golfers from continental Europe such as Seve Ballesteros, Bernhard Langer and Jose Maria Olazabal, who between them won nine major championships, swiftly transformed the Ryder Cup.

In the space of a couple of years it changed from being almost as one sided as the President’s Cup is today into a cutthroat event where the US has been forced onto a very unfamiliar position of being on the back foot. In the 19 Ryder Cups since Europe started its winning streak in 1985 the tally is six victories for the US compared with twelve for Europe. The 1989 match was halved/tied.

Notwithstanding this example of how things can change I’m not convinced it’s needed to make the President’s Cup more competitive. I sense that the Asians, and especially the Koreans for whom I have a particular respect for reasons connected with my day job, will become much more of a factor soon.

Tom Kim may have been a little over the top once or twice last week but the spirit and emotion he displayed are exactly what this event needs from the Internationals. It’s interesting also that they came out 6-3 ahead in the alternate shot foursome matches. This suggests that bonding is not at all a problem for some of them.

I’ve never played Royal Montreal so I can’t comment on the course or on how the golfers tackled it. As a European I had no team loyalty to generate emotion about the result either. But the rarity of seeing team match play on tv, rather than the constant diet of 72 hole medal play competitions which dominate our screens almost every week, was by itself refreshing. Frankly, aside from the majors and a handful of other exceptional events at truly great courses, the similarity of the golf on all the tours can start to feel a touch monotonous by this time of year.

One obvious way to expand the number of team match play events would be to introduce mixed teams. By “mixed” in this context I mean teams consisting of both men and women. I bet that a contest between two teams of six ladies and six men would pull in the punters, especially if, apart from the final day singles, all the matches involved mixed sex pairings. Details such as whether all participants would play from the same tees would need to be resolved but there’s absolutely no practical reason why competitive golf could not be played using this format.

And it might not only be spectators who’d be attracted. Sponsors and advertisers might find the concept of mixed events very enticing. I have long believed that golf should exploit the advantage it has over most other ball games in that it’s a non-contact sport. It’s obvious that mixed rugby, American football or hurling are out of the question. Mixed golf matches would be therefore be a novelty and might have a special appeal for families who wanted to go along and watch in person.

Earlier this week in Global Golf Post Scott Michaux wrote that in the President’s Cup “Both better-ball sessions felt dead…….team golf is simply better when there is a consequence for every shot, which the foursomes and singles matches deliver in spades” [my emphasis]. Amen to that. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

The truth that dare not speak its name is that four ball golf, the format which is played far more than any other the world over, is the least interesting form of golf ever devised. It has the additional, increasingly serious, problem that it’s also the slowest. A significant proportion of the shots you hit are completely meaningless.

Just think about it. You hit a great drive twenty yards longer than the rest of your group. Your partner then knocks a lovely three wood to six feet from the flag, opponent number one proceeds to slice into the trees and opponent number two suffers an unlucky bounce into an impossible lie in a greenside bunker.

Where’s the pressure on you now? It’s nowhere. But pressure, trying to overcome it, and the supreme and magical satisfaction of doing so, an experience which even I have occasionally, is the very essence of the game. You now face a completely useless shot which is irrelevant to the outcome of the match. During the average four ball game at least one person in the group will often find themselves in this position. By contrast it never arises in alternate shot foursomes.

Support for alternate shot foursomes came this week from an unexpected new source. On Monday Gleneagles announced the unreservedly welcome launch of the Gleneagles Foursomes. It may be some time before this competition gains the status of the Sunningdale Foursomes, established in 1934, whose previous winners include many of the best amateurs and professionals of the last ninety years.

Sunningdale also has the unusual distinction of having both its courses ranked by GOLF Magazine in the top sixty in the world. Winged Foot is the club which comes closest to matching this with two in the top eighty. But praising Sunningdale is not to disparage Gleneagles at all. Its matchless location is one of the most beautiful settings for golf in the world.

It has very wisely decided to stage this new competition on the King’s and Queen’s courses, both of which are far better than the more recent but dreadfully dull Jack Nicklaus designed PGA Centenary course. Frantic attempts were made to improve this mediocrity before the 2014 Ryder Cup was played there. They were memorably dismissed by UK Golf Guy (aka David Jones) as “the very lightest touch of lipstick on a pig”.

The shortcomings of the PGA Centenary course must not detract in any way from the fulsome credit which is due to Gleneagles for raising the profile of alternate shot foursomes. Early May should be a lovely time to be in Scotland with the benefit lots of daylight for late afternoon or early evening golf and I wish this new venture every success.

Above all I hope it will enable more golfers to experience the agony and ecstasy of this unique and utterly brilliant format. As I’ve written before, anyone who has never tried it is a golfing virgin. I’m told that it’s never too late to lose your virginity.

ENDS