Welcome to the Ryder Cup: pumping music and incoherent speeches

Ffrom the deck chairs and bean bags of the spectator village, the notes of a song sounded through dried out and fraying voices. They had come from all over Europe, taking vacation leave and emptying bank accounts to join the party. And as they waited patiently in the sweltering Roman heat, they – organically and completely unprompted – began a chorus of Sweet Caroline. It was quite fun. Still, it was nothing that couldn’t be drowned out by an industrial sound system, a few synthetic drum beats downloaded straight from Uppbeat, and a woman spouting banal platitudes for an hour. Little people of the 44th Ryder Cup: shut up. We decide how you are entertained.

And so from the eternal city came the eternal opening ceremony: an inexorable treadmill of pumping music and glossy video montages and speeches so incoherent as to border on crimes against language. Was this a sport? Obviously not. But in the same way, it was apparently the stuff that modern sport seems to be made of these days: some kind of hydrogenated sport-related substance, the fatty tissue of sport, the bit we now have to wade through to get to the thing itself . . “There was something good we lost along the way,” singer-songwriter and famed golf fan Tom Grennan sang from the stage. Know how you feel, buddy. Know how you feel.

There were some decent bits, to be honest. The anthem Fratelli d’Italia is a stunner in any context. Luke Donald’s captain’s speech was a truly impressive piece of work, peppered with fairly accurate Italian and even forgetting to shout out the caddies. But most of the rest will fade unnoticed into the dustbin of history, especially local television host Melissa Satta’s forgettable opening monologue, which seemed to be paid for by the cliché.

The two teams, we were told, would “fight it out like modern gladiators.” Paying tribute to the organizing committee, she noted that “Rome was not built in a day.” Finally, she declared that “the time for talking is over” – a blatant lie, as would become painfully clear over the next 45 minutes – giving way to a deafening military flypast that spewed green, white and red smoke that looked less like a flypast seemed. display of patriotic pageantry and more like an explosion in a Fruit Pastilles factory.

Then came the Americans, all looking a bit strange and uncomfortable in their suits, with their red faces and flattened hair, like suspects in a poaching trial. Captain Zach Johnson began by outlining the “unique relationship” between Italy and the United States. “Italy has given so much to America, and this week we hope that America can give something back to Italy,” he said, which honestly sounded like a rather unfair barter deal: millions of immigrant workers, a rich cultural footprint and an entire national cuisine for the privilege of watching Max Homa for three days.

In any case, no one could accuse Johnson of insincerity. You could tell how much this all meant to him: maybe even a little too much, considering the way he stumbled over the local language. Grazie It took him two tries to get it right. But there was a strong and genuine sense of mission in his words, especially in his description of the Ryder Cup as “the perfect form of competition,” which in American terms presumably means a competition in which the rest of the world does not participate.

The rest of the ceremony passed in a sort of catatonic haze. Donald came forward and talked about his honeymoon in Sardinia. The captains announced their opening foursome combinations. Satta interviewed some celebrities at the front of the stage (“How can you compare driving a car to driving a car?” she asked Carlos Sainz). Grennan grimaced his way through another song. And finally, just in time for the 2025 Ryder Cup at Bethpage, it was all over, which begged the question: why? What purpose did all this serve, apart from justifying the high fee charged to an event management company and making all other forms of human activity more pleasant in comparison?

It comes down, as always, to finances. There’s a reason why the Ryder Cup has grown far beyond the three-day time frame, why UEFA is so keen to turn the Champions League final into a weeklong football festival, why fan parks and cultural celebrations are springing up around major events such as bone growths. The more you can pretend that you’re adding value, that all these other trinkets are part of the actual sport, the more you can convince people to book an extra night at the hotel, an extra day of shopping, restaurant bills and choreography fun. . Fortunately for everyone involved, the real golfing begins soon. For which – as Johnson might put it – we say grazi. Sorry, grace.