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There is an inexorable urge among the media to assess blame for the United States’ loss in this year’s Ryder Cup. They just don’t get it. It doesn’t matter who played whom in what position. It doesn’t matter what guys were picked by the captains. What matters is that match play is an entirely one- on -one, personal thing, and the European team beat the Americans, straight up, fair and square. As the Accenture Match Play tournament has shown, at the Tour level anybody can beat anybody, and the overall level of one’s play is not necessarily highlighted by a one-round performance, which can ultimately be a loss even when the caliber of play is extremely high. You can say what you want about it, but in the end there is a final score, and when you are on the wrong side of it you lose. All the whys and wherefores are media generated, as they are the ones that have to fill endless space on the air and on paper describing hypothetical reasons for what happened.
The stark result is far too simple to satisfy the media. If it is truly just a matter of individuals beating the person in front of them and not some highly complex interaction of psychological factors then what in the world would there be to talk about for the next days and weeks? Certainly the players (at least the ones who lost, and eventually the ones who won) are already past whatever meaning has been placed on the overall result and the perception of individual performance. They have to get ready for the next event, and can’t let one performance, good or bad, distract them from the general direction they are heading in regarding their play. The ball doesn’t care about the fact that you were the hero of the Ryder Cup, or the goat. Once that ball is in the air in that next event it’s “game on”. There is no time to reminisce about past glory, even if it were just last week or last month. The players know this, but the media can’t acknowledge it because the idea isn’t juicy enough.
Thus, there are the recriminations and second-guessing, the blame game going full throttle, even though the entire competition, while momentarily engaging and compelling, is ultimately a non-factor in the playing lives of the participants as far as their own perception of their games. Sure, it’s nice to be on the winning team and even nicer to be the hero, but that is not helping you rise in the World Rankings or on your Tour’s money list. Still, the public perception of what the Ryder Cup means is so remarkably high that players who excel can exploit the notoriety into better contracts and endorsements. Winning also promises a night or two of blissful partying and seemingly endless joy which the losing team is not allowed to share. But the point here is that the players understand that match play is crazy and when they fail to deliver or are one-upped by an opponent it is not a failure on a grand scale. The trumped up nationalism that serves to heap huge amounts of pressure onto the participants is entirely corporate and media induced and undeserved. The event plays a much bigger role than it deserves, and the players suffer accordingly. No one can question this, however, as to do so would be to invite withering criticism from those who benefit from the hysterical hype surrounding the matches. You can bet that the players are more than relieved to get away from an atmosphere that encourages them to suddenly transform from quiet introvert to fist-pumping, crowd exhorting extrovert. While some see this as a welcome change, at least for this one event, I see it as contrived and more likely to play into the hands of those players with already extroverted personalities (Poulter) and to the detriment of other, more introverted players (Woods).
My feeling is that by far the main goal of the player is to simply make the team. Making the team means that the player has achieved elite status of the highest order, and that certainly is a goal of all players, who want desperately to be regarded by their peers (they could care less about the media) as the best of the best. This is also the driving force behind the effort put forth in the matches. Rory said it best when asked about the pressure to perform: “You just don’t want to let the guys down”. They give it their all, and after that, the result is left to the match play gods, and recently the Europeans have had the best of it. Go back a ways and you will see how decidedly opposite things were as the Americans won every two years forever, a situation not unlike the disparity in victories in Major League Baseball’s All –Star game, where the National League won the yearly contest 19 out of 20 times, followed by the American League winning 18 out of 21. There is no real explanation for this, but pundits and media types have to fill the available space with commentary, so there will be endless attempts to come up with answers. Of course, none are available, so the talk continues.
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