Ryder Cup captains’ role grossly overrated

A very clever and amusing Frenchman once dismissed people's post-event capacity to portray history as inevitable as "retrospective clairvoyance". The rest of us more dully call it talking after-the-event. As a genius of French literature Jean Francois Revel was entitled to put it more elegantly but the basic point's the same. And it can apply to anything, even this week's Ryder Cup.

Depressingly familiar

It’s obvious even those of us immune to the allure of playing golf that the two people with the most to gain and the most to lose this week won’t actually be playing at all. Players will play and fans will pony-up. But the Ryder Cup invariably revolves around the captains and what they do or don’t do.

It has become depressingly familiar trend throughout sport, the notion of sidelines genius, the tactical mastermind dictating the ebb and flow of events, supposedly capable of peering into souls and pointing them towards inspiration. Players can play crap but be absolved because of who’s supposedly steering them. And when they’re brilliant, they’re absolved of that responsibility too.

The fact it is mostly claptrap, a journalistic device for imposing cosy-fit narratives onto chains of events that can be tied up into a single convenient bow, doesn't seem to bother anyone. Maybe it is some primal impulse to put shape and order on the fundamentally random. But whatever it is Paul McGinley and Tom Watson are destined to be the hooks upon which the 2014 Ryder Cup will hang.

Hanging together though isn’t an option. One will win and be credited with powers of leadership and insight that the loser will by definition be pitifully short of. It’s as inevitable as a dodgy clubhouse joke – winners get forgiven everything, and get everything explained for them into the bargain.

It’s hardly an exclusive golf-deal. Much has been made of McGinley’s GAA background so he knows just how clairvoyant after-the-event-merchants can be: the one-size-fits-all smugness that comes from knowing the result, having every move and non-move vindicated through the prism of hindsight and coating it all in a cod psychological jargon that contrasts all the more with the summary verdict on the loser, usually mild variations on a “bollocks” theme.

What is singular about the Ryder Cup though is the even more yawning gap between the significance attached to the job of captain and its actual impact. The manager of a real team at least has time to make a fundamental impression on individuals he has actually picked. But golf isn’t about teams. It is resolutely individualistic. The Ryder Cup started as an exhibition, a promotion device, and at heart remains a curio. Fiddling with formats doesn’t alter the solo reality.

Martial undertones

None of which is going to prevent McGinley v Watson getting portrayed as a polo-necked Waterloo, both men moving their troops around like polyester Pattons. It’s hardly a coincidence that the most memorable Ryder Cups have contained martial undertones.

The significance of who plays with who, and in what order, and how many times, will be endlessly parsed for a meaning and significance that far outweighs any actual impact on what happens out on the course, all of it camouflaging just how sideline a role the captains actually have.

These are the masterminds that get to pick only a fraction of their team. Coaching during play is forbidden, and anyone actually needing to be coached shouldn’t really be there anyway. Captains do decide who pairs up on the first two days, and get to figure out who goes when on the last day. But managing to not put together players who hate each other’s guts is hardly a nugget of motivational genius.

Ultimately the most important bit of the captaincy gig appears to be setting the tone for the team, which really boils down really to not annoying the troops. Hardly a high bar you might think, but one which several in the past have managed to comfortably limbo under. Apart from that the gig mostly looks to involve racing around in a buggy and trying not to pee in the soup during the ceremonial stuff.

Considering both Watson and McGinley are by all accounts bright, articulate and eminently likeable individuals, a job-spec that includes golf knowledge, straight-forwardness and common sense might reasonably be expected to lie within their capabilities. What it hardly requires is the logistic capabilities of an Eisenhower, Freudian awareness, or tantric self-control. Not that that will be obvious in the aftermath.

Retrospective dots will get joined to portray how the inevitability of the result is intertwined with the captain’s cunning brilliance while the losing captain will be automatically cretinous and cack-handed.

Apparently when Seve Ballesteros led Europe to win at Valderamma in 1997, his captaincy technique consisted of little more than jumping up and down in a frothing sweat. But he won. Two years later at Brookline, Mark James was widely denounced despite most within the losing European camp acclaiming his quiet assurance throughout.

Leadership skills

Paul Azinger

wrote a book on the back of captaining the 2008 Ryder Cup winning side, where his supposed leadership skills included the Churchillian observation to

Anthony Kim

: “I thought you were going to show me something today. You’re showing me squat!” On the back of victory, that becomes inspirational. Lose and it is bullying. In reality, it’s an over-excited man stating the obvious. You don’t have to be clairvoyant, however, to know that reality will take a backseat this week.