The time the Ryder Cup almost died
Peter Dazeley
Recently, my colleague Jamie Kennedy sent me a newspaper article from 1973, The Evening Post, about that year's Ryder Cup. In bold letters, after the first paragraph, a proclamation:
THE PROFIT COULD REACH £100,000
At today's Ryder Cup, of course, £100,000 wouldn't pay for three rows of a grandstand build, and it's an indication of how quickly things have changed in the last 50 years. But in order to become the multi-million dollar juggernaut it is today, the Ryder Cup had to endure its own share of struggles. It almost died in World War Two before it was saved by a grocery executive from Portland, and for the first 50 years, all the way up to 1981, there was very little competitive balance, with the Americans winning in routs over and over again. At Jack Nicklaus' behest—he saw how the event was losing prestige, and how players like Tom Weiskopf were skipping it to go sheep hunting—the British PGA expanded the team from the UK to all of Europe in 1979, but even then, the Americans won twice more in dull blowouts.
After the last of these, in '81 in Walton Heath, the Ryder Cup faced an existential crisis that was somehow even greater than the decade off during World War Two. Its best player, Seve Ballesteros, had been left off the team over an appearance fees dispute in '81 and wanted nothing to do with it; the long-time stalwart Tony Jacklin was similarly disgruntled after not getting a captain's pick, and worst of all, their chief sponsor, the Sun Alliance Bank, dropped its decade-long support.
Graham Finlayson
Bob Martin
Colin Snape, the executive secretary of the PGA, found himself in an impossible spot. He had to find a sponsor, but nobody was very interested. For the better part of a year, he was on the hunt for anything that could keep the Ryder Cup going, but as late as December 1982, less than a year before the next Cup was set to tee off in Florida, he had nothing.
At that moment, it looked very much like the entire institution might fail, and it's not at all clear that very many people cared.
On this week's Local Knowledge, we're diving into that era of hardship and looking at the incredible story of how the Ryder Cup managed to survive its lowest moment, against the odds. The task ahead of this cast of characters—Snape, Jacklin, Ballesteros—was not just to keep the event afloat, but to somehow produce a competitive, compelling spectacle when their only precedent was 50+ years of blowouts. The fact that they pulled it off, and so quickly, is one of the miracles of modern sport.
Listen below, or wherever you get your podcasts.
