Telfer's Thoughts 22.9.25

Justin Thomas, a member of the American Ryder Cup team, is predicting this year’s Cup which starts on Friday will be the wildest one of them all.

Most Ryder Cups these days dispense pretty quickly with many of those polite rituals we’re supposed to observe when we play and for the most part we all do. But not so at the Ryder Cup, especially when it’s played in New York. The three-day event will pack in 50,000 fans each day. If you think New York fans can get a bit rowdy at the US Tennis Open, apparently, according to Thomas, ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet’. One of the absolute no-no’s in any golf game of course is cheering when an opponent mises a putt. But at Bethpage this week I pity any poor European player who misses an important putt. He will get the biggest cheer of the day from the raucous New York fans. The British commentators will smugly castigate those ignorant American fans, conveniently forgetting European fans are not averse to a bit of that bad mouth cheering as well when the Cup is on European soil.

Bethpage is a remarkable venue, sometimes known as The People’s Country Club. There are five

public courses - a Red, Green, Blue, Black and Yellow course. On any given day you can see regular

golfers with their traditional golfing attire, but in the group behind you might see golfers wearing jean shorts and tank tops. The Black Course is considered as hard as any US Open Championship course with a series of steep uphill holes and others like the first hole which falls away 40 feet from the tee to the green. However the guardians give you fair warning before you tee off. There’s this famous sign nailed to the fence around the first tee which states in big bold print:

WARNING

The Black Course is An

Extremely Difficult Course

Which We Recommend Only

For Highly Skilled Golfers.

In other words if your handicap is in double figures or near it, head back to the pro shop and hassle for a return of your green fee and get out of the place.

So this is the heady setting for what’s shaping up as the golfing clash for the ages.

Who will win it this year? As a rule of thumb, Ryder Cups tend to be won by the home team. The Europeans flipped that theory during a 20-year stint from 1995 to 2014 when they won 8 out of the 10 Ryder Cups.

This year at home and heavily backed by that rowdy fanatical base of home fans cheering endlessly, heaven forbid, “USA USA USA”, it might just be enough to get the Americans over the line, despite the fact that a third of their 12-strong team are Ryder Cup rookies. The European team has a far more experienced look about it. In fact it looks on paper as strong as any they have ever fielded, rich with Ryder Cup veterans like Rory McIlroy, John Rahm, Justin Rose, Tommy Fleetwood, Tyrell Hatton, Robert McIntyre, Victor Hovland, Matt Fitzpatrick and Shane Lowry, as well as one of the rising stars of world golf, Ludwig Aberg.

Eleven of this 12-strong team played in the last Ryder Cup. What a line-up. Let’s just get it started!