Watching the final day of the Ryder Cup golf tournament was about as gut-wrenching a competition as there ever can be in a golf setting.
Our very own American squad, staring at the face of certain victory, began the day with a four-point lead and every writer and spectator around the world wrote the Europeans off as losers. With 12 match-play style events remaining, our home-grown talent needed to claim only 4.5 points in order to win the trophy back from Europe, which had won the trophy in seven of the last eight Ryder Cup events.
But even insurmountable leads are capable of being erased, as the Europeans proved on Sunday. One by one the matches were dropped by the U.S. team as Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Steve Stricker and others fell one-by-one, unable to claim full points that could have helped the American squad take back the trophy.
Instead, they either tied or lost the majority of those singles matches. It culminated when Martin Kaymer and Francesco Molinari of Europe were able to draw their matches against Woods and Stricker, giving Europe just enough of a cushion in the end to keep the trophy for another two years. Furyk, typically a player the U.S. squad looks for when collecting points, didn’t win a single match Sunday afternoon.
It was a tough watch for me, both as a golf fan and as a fan of the entire “team concept” of the Ryder Cup. Golf, which revolves around one person taking down over one hundred others just to win a four-day tournament, is one of those sports where you just can’t ignore the concept of team play when it comes around.
In my opinion, it doesn’t happen often enough.
The entire aspect of sports in almost every country revolves around a team concept. Football, soccer, rugby, and even cricket all have a team aspect. While I can’t think of all the sports that involve one person taking down a host of others, bowling is one that sticks out in my mind as being purely based on one person taking on a whole field.
For m ore information check out the Oct.4 edition of Davis Clipper.
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