President’s attendance could lead to Brookline levels of excitement at an event that is invariably febrile
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AAAH-BA-BAAH! It had just gone nine in the morning when the speakers started blasting out Village People’s YMCA. Scottie Scheffler, the world No 1, had arrived on the putting green and everyone was whooping and hollering at him. Scheffler bumped fists with one of his coaches, wrapped another up in a hug and, BAH-BA-BADA-BADA-BAH!, walked on up and across the bridge to the practice ground where there was a crowd of 500 or so waiting.
They started chanting. “YEW-ESS-AY! YEW-ESS-AY!” Scheffler’s a big man. By the time he made it on to the range he seemed to have swelled twice the size.
There are a few hundred thousand reasons why the home team wins two out of three editions of the Ryder Cup. One of them is the nature of the courses, which, like the English language, are the same, but different either side of the Atlantic. The second is that the captains are allowed to tweak the widths of the fairways, the height of the rough and the speed of the greens to suit their own team.
