Feeding the beast

Golf:A voracious media demands quotes, and plenty of them, at an event like the Ryder Cup. While the organisers are only too happy to oblige, Paul Gallagherwonders if somebody needs to say when?

When does too much of a good thing become a bad thing? The spoon-feeding nature of information provided during Ryder Cup week is overbearing in the extreme. Never mind the impact on the rain forests of the endless interview handouts, it’s often a case of not seeing the wood for the trees.

The Ryder Cup attracts somewhere in the region of 3,000 media personnel, all filtering their nuggets of information back to source to be in place for readers, viewers and listeners to digest across an ever-expanding selection of platforms - press, TV, radio, internet, tweets, blogs, the list goes on.

Where once the traditional art of a one-on-one interview was the norm, the Ryder Cup – like so many other international sporting showpieces – has become a behemoth where individual access to players is restricted and the regimented nature of proceedings takes hold.

A cursory glance at the media schedule for Ryder Cup week could leave the faint-hearted bamboozled. Okay, so what have we been spoon-fed so far?

After the teams' arrivals, Monday was something of a soft launch. Captains Colin Montgomerie and Corey Pavin were door-stepped the moment they arrived at Cardiff airport. By 4pm they were ushered into the media centre for further interrogation.

Come Tuesday - and with the official team photographs already in the can - the ante is upped and the fun and games begin. Tuesday alone offered up 14 different interviews; two captains and six players from either side, including Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy.

Wednesday provided more of the same. The conveyor belt cranked into action from as early as 7.30am with Zach Johnson first behind the mic and by day’s end 11 official interviews were posted in the “media information” centre.

Thursday’s selection is reduced to five interviews as final practice and the opening ceremony need to be squeezed in. The main draw, obviously, is the announcement of Friday’s pairings. These were previously issued in the media centre about one hour before the captains officially announced them but this has changed after Sky Sports broke the embargo at Valhalla.

Bearing in mind this is only Thursday, a quick tally reveals no less than 32 separate “official” interviews and not a single competitive shot hit in anger.

For a hungry media already gorging on the banquet, there is little need to even leave the comfort of your own seat, if so inclined. Sit back and it’s fed straight to your lap(top), a case of bringing the mountain to Mohammed.

If, for whatever reason, a member of the press corps doesn’t want to get out of their seat and attend the live interview, or collect hard copy transcribes from one of the 90 (and counting) nests at media information, they simply plug in the desk headphones, listen in, then wait a few minutes and the full transcript lands into your inbox.

Sure, this may sound like biting your nose off to spite your face and denigrating the craft of golf reporting. But there is assuredly no substitute for getting out there and soaking it up in real time and seeking out a few quotes and opinions of your own before firing up the laptop.

The problem with the build up to Ryder Cups is there is so much “generic” information thrown out there. And though retrieving the information has never been easier, there is a heartfelt relief among the media when the tournament kicks-off proper.

After all, there’s no substitute for the cut-and-thrust of live action.