Let The Games Begin

Our editor-at-large looks ahead to the Ryder Cup, which is poised to be one of the best in the event’s history.

- Bill Elliott

Whatever else this autumn’s Ryder Cup will boast, surely style will be one of the old rumble’s attributes this time round, if only because a sense of style is what the French do best. Or at least they think they do.

What, however, they don’t do that well when it comes to golf is atmosphere. Over the years I’ve been to too many supposedly big-time tournaments in France that have had all the atmosphere of a rather genteel garden party.

Left to their own devices it might well be that this Ryder Cup would be the best-dressed battle between the USA and Europe that we’ve ever seen, but it would also be the most subdued because golf in France – and especially in Paris – is still a game that is largely populated by the well-heeled, the Gucci clad, the sort of folk who don’t want to let themselves go in case an impromptu move spoils the carefully arranged line of a jacket or the hem of a silk dress.

Thankfully, we needn’t fret much about these possibilities. Instead, let us give thanks for the Channel Tunnel and the packed trains that each day of this fun-packed week will deliver unto Paris the Brits and the Irish, with their flags and their daft costumes. Best of all, most important of all, these trains will unload passion into the Gare du Nord, a station I know only too well having slept in it for a couple of nights a thousand years ago as I hippied my poverty-stricken way round bits of la belle France. The Gendarmerie weren’t great hosts, but that’s another story.

And passion, both outside the ropes and inside, is what the Ryder Cup is about. A country versus a continent, a game of golf but much more besides.