C'mon, Wales always gets rain in October!

AMERICA AT LARGE:IN JULY of 1988 I was in Britain when persistent rainstorms forced a Monday finish for both the All-England Lawn Tennis Championships and the British Open Championship.

Being forced to stick around an extra day might have been a minor annoyance for Mr Edberg, who defeated Boris Becker in the gentlemen’s final that year, and for Mr Ballesteros, who won the last of his five major titles at Lytham St Anne’s that year, but it was extremely inconvenient for me, since I was in possession of non-refundable airline tickets in both instances.

For a small fortune I was able to rebook my flight out of London to accommodate the delayed tennis final. In a hastily reconfigured scheme two weeks later I put my then-wife and two small children on an overnight ferry from Liverpool to Dublin, where I rejoined them a night later.

You might suppose, then, that a representative of a generation that grew up with Won’t Get Fooled Again as its anthem would have been shrewd enough to have anticipated the possibility of the Ryder Cup spilling over into Monday play for the first time in history, and, truth be told, if I’d known a few months ago what I know now I’d probably have allowed for the possibility of spending several extra days in Wales.

Instead, when Hunter Mahan missed a putt and conceded his match to Graeme McDowell on the 17th green at Celtic Manor, I was more than a 100 miles away, listening to an account of the celebration on the radio of a rental car that would shortly be surrendered at Gatwick Airport.

Even in the midst of the wild jubilation taking place all around them, within a few minutes one of the BBC talking heads remarked to another that the US and European PGA Tours really did need to put their heads together and make sure there would never, ever, be another attempt to play another Ryder Cup in the British Isles in October.

The Twenty Ten Course at Celtic Manor is a spectacular venue of breathtaking beauty that is in many respects ideally suited to its purpose: a superb test of golf that could accommodate upwards of 40,000 spectators. What it is not, although it has frequently been described that way by American golf writers who don’t know any better, is an “inland links course” – a contradiction in terms if ever there was one.

By staging the event where they did and when they did, the movers and shakers operating Ryder Cup invited the inevitable consequence.

There were 75 million good reasons why the 2010 Ryder Cup was played at Celtic Manor. That’s the amount, in sterling, Terry Mathews and his friends from Welsh tourism anted up in tribute. The price tag is a five-fold increase over the buy-in for the K Club four years earlier, and it probably represents a trend that will only increase as we get deeper into the 21st century.

But it should also be noted that when he landed the event, Terry did not in his wildest dreams contemplate hosting an October Ryder Cup. That part of the equation was a consequence of the US tour stretching its parameters to accommodate the season-ending FedEx Cup.

It’s always going to rain in Wales, and it is a matter of statistical fact that the measurable October rainfall in Newport and its environs is one and a half times what it is in September.

Its location in the lush Usk Valley that contributes to Celtic Manor’s striking beauty also makes it a collection point for the runoff from the surrounding mountains. The suggestion, then, that the woes besetting last weekend’s competition were the result of bad luck from the weather gods is laughable. It was entirely predictable.

Once things got off the rails on Friday, the Ryder Cup folks appeared to recover nicely, reconfiguring the order of events without disturbing the essential format of eight fourballs, eight foursomes matches, and 12 singles. They even seemed to have things set up to finish on schedule by nightfall on Sunday until another downpour pushed the conclusion of matches already underway back a few hours.

Once that happened, though, the decision to push the singles matches back to Monday seemed to come with precipitate haste, and the suspicion is television was calling the tune.

Now, a revised plan had been worked out, including such details as a drop-dead timeline of 6:45 pm on Monday. Any matches that hadn’t been completed by then would be considered halved, no matter what score might have been obtained. No sooner had the rains begun to abate Sunday morning than came the announcement the two foursomes and four fourball matches wouldn’t resume until 1:30 pm.

This involved a lot of futzing around before play commenced, and since those matches finished with at least a couple of hours of daylight remaining, it seemed curious to some who probably weren’t thinking of Nielsen ratings back in the States.

From the vantage point of American television it was a very different picture. In that industry, overall viewership – how many people are watching your programming – can be less important than audience share – how your viewership stacks up against that of the competition.

Once being able to complete play on Sunday seemed unlikely, NBC didn’t much care when the golf started that day, as long as it was off the air by six that evening.

CBS and FOX had a full slate of NFL games that would begin at 1pm Eastern time. The Ryder Cup figured to hold its own against the pre-game shows, while after kick-off most viewers would switch to the other networks’ football telecasts.

Even though they were plainly knuckling under yet again to outside economic considerations, the Ryder Cup organisers tried to give the appearance of fairness by honouring Sunday tickets for Monday’s play.

In practice, it was anything but fair. It short-changed patrons who bought tickets for what they anticipated would be the final day’s play but had to be back at work on Monday. What they got instead was half a day’s worth of partial matches. European television viewers who couldn’t sneak out of work on Monday were also deprived of watching any of the singles play.

For anyone dumb enough to be holding nonrefundable airline tickets on Monday, it didn’t work out too well, either. But on the radio it sounded like a hell of a finish.