Over the weekend, I was doing some yardwork in between tournament baseball games — now I’m speaking the language some of you are currently immersed in! — and I had time to knock out Soly’s excellent podcast on Ryder Cup captains.
It is really well done and a cool use of some of the content NLU has banked up over the years including interviews with the specific people involved in so many of these events.
I had a lot of takeaways — including Shane Ryan’s logical “so a captain can be a bad captain but not a good captain?” quandary of a question — but the biggest one for me was when and how the Ryder Cup turned back in the 1980s.
I’m sure I had read this or heard it at some point, but mentally it felt fresh and I bookmarked it for future use. Shane tells the story about how 1983 was the inflection point. That was the year Tony Jacklin was asked to be captain. He leveraged the European Tour’s desire for him to be captain, and started demanding the whole world for his players. And they just … gave it all to him.
But he was only half of the duo that flipped everything. His superstar, Seve, was the other half. Following a 14.5-13.5 defeat in Florida in which Seve earned 3 points, he had the Euros frothing at the mouth in the aftermath.
Here’s Shane reading a quote from Sam Torrance, who was on that team as well.
The Sunday night at Palm Beach, he was extraordinary. He made us all shout out, "We will beat them!" He had tears streaming down his face. It was ridiculous the amount of emotion that was shown.
Sam Torrance
A small — seemingly inconsequential — moment that probably changed the course of an event that so many people hold so dear. Shane posits it as the beginning of what we know of as the Euro culture that is now so celebrated.
There are 1,001 takeaways from the pod, and you should listen to the entire thing. But that was the one moment I’ll take away and think about going into the matches this year at Bethpage as the U.S. seemingly looks for its own point of inflection, which could potentially come from Keegan Bradley (as I hypothesized here).
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