If you’re Australian and a reader of a glossy sports magazine such as our crackerjack journal, chances are you have an allegiance to a sports team. Could be one from Australian rules, could be one from a code of rugby, could be one from the game known as “football” in this and most other countries, though let us not go delving into #CodeWar rabbit holes; there can be no coming back.
Instead, let’s stay on positive ground and posit that if you’re a team sports fan – Go You Raiders! Up the Arsenal! and so on – you would also likely support our national teams: the cricketers, the Matildas, even the wobbly old Wallabies.
Every four years at the Games of the so many Roman numerals Olympiad, Australians invest in the fortunes of teams – basketball, rugby 7s, our awesome coxless fours.
But ask yourself: do you care, viscerally, in your plumbs, as they say – or even just in passing – about the International team in the Presidents Cup?
Do you support the Internationals as you might Wanderers, Waratahs or Bulldogs of both stripes?
Do you support – can you support – a 12-man team of golfers representing a claque of disparate nation states?
Fans get behind the Internationals at Royal Melbourne in 2019. PHOTO: Getty Images
Europeans seem to care, of course, for their continent in the Ryder Cup. It’s a hoot, the Ryder Cup, with great gaggles of Irish, French, Italians and Swedes painting faces, chanting in unison and creating all that great “colour” beloved of Big TV and the advertisers thereon. Certainly looks like they’re having fun.
And Americans care, of course, for their team in the season-ending team events named for their Presidents and after Samuel Ryder, who was born in Lancashire in 1858 and who took up golf at the age of 50 and who invented the Ryder Cup in 1926 in which the 10-man team of professionals from the United States included four Brits and Joe Kirkwood from Manly.
And why not? They are supporting their country as it takes on all-comers in events showcasing the greatest players in the world. To be American and follow the United States of America means flags and star-spangled action, and all the unbridled noise of our slightly left-field cousins, the mashed potato people.
Greg Norman tried to create, let’s call it, “Aussie spirit” in the Presidents Cup of 2011 at Royal Melbourne when he literally rented a crowd, The Fanatics, a supporter squad of flag-wearing “Oi-oi-oi” types, enamoured of their own wit, bathing in celebrity by association, using the national flag as capes, and deeply irritating many, let’s call them “old people”, such as The Australian’s Patrick Smith, who wrote they should be locked out of the grounds, release the hounds, and so on.
The Fanatics brigade stayed put (and not, unfortunately for Paddy, mute), yet no matter the happy-clapping from the green-and-gold malaria – and no matter the heavy Aussie presence in the playing group – the Americans flogged the Internationals, on our patch, on our sacred ground, the composite at RM, for most of the four-day bender.
Presidents Cups 2011 captains Greg Norman and Fred Couples with Fanatics. PHOTO: Getty Images.
By the Sunday afternoon, when Tiger Woods stiffed a brilliant shot from the sand and beat Aaron Baddeley four-and-three, it was all over Lucas Glover, 19-15, and there followed atmosphere akin to a kegger party around the 15th green, all red-white-and-blue, the united colours of Benneton, shirts with the little horse on them, Richie Cunningham and Ralph Malph cavorting in the lettermen cardigans of Jefferson High School, as the American players hugged their wives for a long time in a manner that Craig Parry, say, or Peter Lonard would not.
Regardless, they were right into it, the Americans, and their smattering of backpacking fans were also. And this year at Royal Montreal, as they do at the Ryder Cup, Americans will be barracking for their country and their countrymen.
But “us”? By which I mean our Canadian friends? Will they be as into it? Even with Mike Weir‘s hopes that they’ll treat turn Royal Montreal into what hockey fans would call “away ice”.
Our cousin Canucks tend to be less demonstrative than the folks from the Lower 48. Being “nice” is a national cliche.
Yes, the Canadian fans will be out in force, because it’s world-class golf. But viscerally, vocally supporting the team of Australians, South Africans, Koreans and representatives of all the other continents and land masses that form the 12-man “International” team? Will they really give that much of a stuff? Even with a handful of wildcard Canadians making up numbers picked in the team?
And what about those players? Can they get themselves into the emotional position where they’re playing for something bigger than themselves? Can they channel sufficient adrenaline-driven emotion, passion, mojo, juju, for Team Rest-of-the-World-Outside-America-and-Europe?
What do they represent? And how do you, sports fan, follow them? Go, claque of disparate nation states outside the United States and Europe. Go.
But do we really care if the Internationals win? And if we don’t, is it not almost like … what’s the point?
Min Woo Lee will be a crowd favourite at Royal Montreal. PHOTO: Getty Images.
Well! Isn’t that a cheery way for the writer to begin a Presidents Cup preview piece. Some may question why a fellow whose employment depends upon the great game would run it down so. Some may wonder: Isn’t it in this gibberer’s interest to pump the tyres of golf? Why work in a game he has such apparent disdain for?
And those folks would be wrong. Because they are not, necessarily, in media, and would not perhaps understand that all we little wannabe Woodward and Bernsteins (Google ’em, kids) want our stories to Make A Difference. Even if they rarely do.
For no matter our bleating, the Olympics remains four rounds of stroke-play, the PGA Championship is only in America, and the Presidents Cup International team only plays against the United States and not against Europe, too, because Big TV rules the world.
Big TV’s money dictates what we watch and when. And four days of stroke-play across 30-odd hours of broadcasting, upon which ad sales-folk can sell ad space, remains, apparently, the sexiest attraction for the eyeballs of American consumers, of which there is a veritable motherlode.
And here we are.
The International Team is made up of the top six players on the Official World Golf Rankings, and six picks by Weir, and nobody from LIV Golf. And thus, the International team, which has one win and one tie in 30 years, cannot call upon Abe Ancer, Dean Burmester, Branden Grace, Lucas Herbert, Danny Lee, Anirban Lahiri, Marc Leishman, Sebastien Munoz, Louis Oosthuizen, Mito Pereira, Carlos Ortiz or those funky Vincent brothers with the hippy haircuts.
“It is just an unfortunate situation that we’re in right now, and they are not eligible as of now,” Weir said. “I have been told they’re not eligible; they’re not going to be eligible. Hopefully going forward, maybe in Chicago in 2026, they are. It is a shame. I mean, we want the best players.”
Marc Leishman bought into the spirit of the 2019 Presidents Cup. This time around, he’s not allowed in the gates. PHOTO: Getty Images.
On the other side, the U.S team isn’t a true representative of the United States, being drawn only from eligible players from the U.S PGA Tour. And thus the Americans won’t be calling upon Brooks Koepka, Talor Gooch and, you know, U.S Open champion Bryson DeChambeau.
Because the PGA Tour owns the Presidents Cup, no one from LIV Golf is allowed to play. The Tour writes the rules in the Tour’s interest. And, as they kiboshed Norman’s “world tour” in 1994, the Presidents Cup was founded, in part, so they could keep writing those rules, and thus preserve the Tour’s hegemony against perceived external threats.
Yes, of course – the Presidents Cup will be a cracking spectacle and an exhibition of super world-class golf. The format is cool – there should be more team events, and more match-play in world pro golf. And while we’re there, more mixed events, and didn’t the Olympics miss a trick there.
And, of course, because we’re Australians, golf fans and discerning consumers of Australia’s most read glossy golf magazine, we’ll wake early, as we do for the Masters, and tune in, and hope our team knocks over their team, particularly if our guys – the Chef, J-Day, Scotty – stick it right up ’em.
But we’re being sold a pup. Half a one, anyway.
This piece is an edited extract from Matt Cleary’s feature piece in the October issue of Golf Australia magazine. Part II will go up on Thursday.
© Golf Australia. All rights reserved.