Dubs fail to make the cut in twee tee fest

Like it or loathe it, the Ryder Cup has a flavour all of its own. Two flavours actually. When the big top goes Stateside, the tent gets filled with raucous partisans who treat it as a form of TV wrestling. They hiss and holler while we Euroweenies shake our heads and say, tut tut tut. From Tom Humphries at The Belfry

On this side of what golfing folk, in common with the boxing community, like to call "the big pond", the Ryder Cup is an exploration in twee. They are all at it, all the Europeans out there, expressing their cultural superioritwee. There is no need for a Nice Tweety; we are united and together in this. We are prim and dapper and almost camp in our tweeness. The spectators on the twee-lined fairways. The players. Bernard "Nearer-my-God to Twee" Langer, Colin Montgomertwee and Twee Westwood to name just a randomly chosen tweesome.

The De Vere Belfry, hosting its fourth Ryder Cup, has twee down to, auhm, a tee. It's anti-America in the most British, most condescending sense. We have our dinky little tank tops, it says, and we have our sacred etiquette, it says. We have our tradition and golly gumshoes, we have our plucky girls.

And what girls. Across the manicured acres of The De Vere Belfry, they match the Americans smile for smile, trouser suit for trouser suit. As Europeans go, they are in no way dentally challenged or tonsorially disadvantaged. Their teeth have a Californian gleam to them. Their hair has the sort of volume you need planning permission for.

The women of the Ryder Cup! What a battle it's shaping up to be! Suddenly the wives and wives-in-waiting are all over the place as if planted here by benign alien lifeforms with an interest in peroxide. Placid and docile like The Stepford Wives, they peck about on the fairways smiling dazzlingly at everything except brunettes and ugly people until The Stand by your Man moment comes around. What an advance for womankind they all are, decked out in their flight-attendant uniforms and cheering their well-tended heads off every time a putt drops or a drive straightens.

The Ryder Cup has seen the future and it is ice skating. The 18th hole has become golf's equivalent of the kiss-and-cry area which the ice divas go to wait their scores and get huggies and kissies from their coaches.

On the 18th at The Belfry, the chaps who have already finished wait and encourage their team-mates with the sincerity of their facial expressions and when the menfolk come off the green, their ladies kiss them and rub their jumpered backs so vigourously that cheaper clothing would catch fire from static electricity.

Darkness was falling yesterday by the time the handshaking and hugging on the 18th was done with. Sadly, the women don't give press conferences. We don't get to hear what is the best combination of sensible but stylish shoe for trudging The Belfry, we are frustratingly ignorant of their views on the local mineral water.

It's a pity. The media are itching for a fight and the boys aren't going to give us one. Wifely mud-wrestling. Face slapping. Pistols. Anything would suffice. Just enough of this niceness. Without spite the Ryder Cup is nothing for us in the media. Instead, we are getting twee. Bring back the elevated bitchiness of recent encounters, we say. TV loved it. Fans loved it. Newspapers loved it. The Brookline spat was pure Will & Grace. Ratings gold.

After various wars and battles over the last few Ryder Cups, there is an odd air of serene unreality over this series. Nobody wants to go negative. Nobody wants to throw the first slap. The supposed horror of "the scenes at Brookline" still linger in the memory. September 11th has allegedly bestowed some sort of perspective on the flag-waving crazies. So we're left with nice and twee and polite. Nothing more, nothing less.

David Feherty said after Brookline the Ryder Cup was in need of a great and unnecessary act of sportsmanship to restore its old gentlemanly glory. We won't get war here, but we won't get that gesture either. Not after Phil Mickelson was made putt out his three-footer for a half on the last hole of the day yesterday. The Ryder Cup war will be fought in terms of understated oneupmanship. We will continue to be fed the forced bonhomie which made yesterday in the press tent so extraordinarily dull.

Everybody was proud of everyone else. Everyone was proud of the crowd. Everyone was even nice about Colin Montgomerie. Everyone who heard it was a little nauseous.

"I've never had more fun on a gold course than I did today," said Niclas Fasth. "Not one unpleasant comment out there," said Paul Azinger. "I kept saying to Phil (Mickelson) how much fun I was having," said David Toms. "We're all really happy, " said Sergio Garcia. "The feeling in the team is just great," said Paul McGinley. And so on.

Azinger suggested the course was set up to neutralise big swingers, but he was so even handed about it that he made it seem like a good thing. Tiger Woods, just 3½ points won in his Ryder Cup history was smiling and was on the 18th for the hug fest when Mickelson putted to halve the last hole of the day. Everybody, be they American, European or blonde wife, felt for him. Sergio thought what happens to Woods at these things was part of the attraction, like getting Van Gogh to paint on a bouncy castle.

"That's the beauty of the Ryder Cup," he said. "The best player in the world can come and lose easily. A guy who doesn't look to be playing well at all can go out and scrape a win or make a half."

We wanted to ask about the possibilities for a man with an ugly wife or an ugly man with no wife, of a plain pug ugly couple, but there was a fear that umbrage would be taken by Colin Montgomerie.

The only sour note, the first little fly in the great soothing ointment of pleasantness, came at the end of the day when the press room was treated to the disastrous news that the Dubs have been dropped. This morning's foursomes will feature no Padraig Harrington and no Paul McGinley. Europe has launched a unilateral strike on Dublin. Our boys aren't twee enough for them.

So be it. They'll make their own fun tomorrow morning. It's the wives who'll suffer.