Still a non-believer despite Irish Ryder win

LockerRoom/Tom Humphries

Can you help me? I don't feel European. Never have. Is there somewhere I can go? Some treatment I can get? Essence of Garret FitzGerald maybe. I know that from the Carpathians to the Sugarloaf the bunting was out yesterday. I know that Paul McGinley is the king of the continent. It's me that's wrong. I think Ireland won the Ryder Cup.

I need to get my head straight. The Sports Editor will be demanding same at a terse meeting any day soon. Twice now he has filled out accreditation forms for the Ryder Cup and said to me sternly that there's no point in going if I'm going to, well, going to urinate all over the Ryder Cup. I disagree. I think a large part of sports journalism should be the tamping down of flammable hype by whatever means come to hand. That hurts his feelings though.

I can't get into the European thing. I like the idea of a big European economic trough that we Irish people can keep our snouts into, I am an idealist after all. Also I'm in favour of letting anyone else who wants to stick their snout in the trough have unimpeded access both in terms of immigrants and expansion. Yet I'm not in favour of war or Blair or strudel. I absolutely draw the line at being asked to cheer for Colin Montgomerie.

Yesterday morning at the Ryder Cup, an event at which I feel as isolated as a virgin at a Tory party conference I ran my finger along the line-ups for the singles and realised that either I wasn't a good European or the Ryder Cup is a crock. Or both.

Twelve single games on the final day and I'm never going to be rooting for Monty or Lee Westwood. If they are playing poker with the devil for my soul, I'm cheering for the guy with the cloven feet. I like big Hal Sutton's drawl and don't like stars who can't keep their religion in their pockets so Hal gets the nod against Langer. USA 3 Europe 0. I love David Duval, the quintessential golf loner , the definition of why this will never be a team sport. Darren Clarke? Too many stogies and Bentleys and moody press conferences for me. So that's 4-0.

On we go. Phil the Thrill or Phillip Price? No arguments. This column stands for nothing if not for thrills. Bjorn versus Cink? Halved by virtue of my indifference to both men. Fulke and Davis Love III goes the same way. If he were plain old Davis Love I think it would be an American win though. Europe wins the rest.

So that's it. 6-6. Europe tie by virtue only of the frivolous affectation on the end of David Love's name. 6 all.

Let me skip back a while here. My history: I have always been against the Ryder Cup. It a lonely furrow. A hard walk. A heroic stance, if I may say so myself. I work after all in a sports department which sees golf as the loftiest expression of the possibilities of humankind. Yet I have seen some of the finest minds of my generation made mushy by golf.

In this context an embarrassing thing happened three years ago. A near lapse. I went to Brookline and enjoyed it. I'd came to bury the Ryder Cup and not to praise it but, but but . . . I liked it for all the wrong reasons. I liked Boston and have good friends there, I like the city's beeriness, I liked the raucous partisan crowd, the Monty baiting, the Americans hoofing all over the green. Frankly I prefer seeing Yanks getting their rocks off on the 17th green than getting them off in a bunker somewhere in Iraq.

I was entertained by the entire thing right down to the prissy European response and Mark James's hysterical ranting about the bear pits.

I was still doubtful about the big concept but, hey, if you're going to pretend that golf is a partisan team sport well then let's have partisan teams. Don't pretend that it's a tea party.

It's taken The Belfry to restore my faith. Golf is not a team sport. It's an individualistic game processed for commercial/television reasons into a team sport every two years or so. For economic reasons this sport for loners got inextricably wrapped up in the gossamer-thin bonhomie of the middle classes. The great heroes have virtually all been prickly misfits. Hagen, Hogan, Nicklaus, Player, Faldo, Duval, Woods etc. They're not team players. That's the whole point about them. Yesterday it came down to Paul McGinley and a horrible putt. No team, no continent. One man and his nerve.

He dropped it. Won his moment. Immediately tricolours matierialised. Older, harder, meanings of Europe.

YOU thrill for Paul McGinley but Europe is not a natural entity to make a team out of. The game isn't prevalent enough here. Monty sinking a long putt doesn't provoke a great and joyful yawp to go up from a fishing boat off Bergen or a crazy yahoo to issue from the mouth of a delirious goatherd on a hill outside Athens.

There is no great European dream that unites us except maybe fiscal parity. Nothing held the Ryder Cup together in the bad years other than the bloody-minded anti-Americanism of an old world which was sure it could still give Uncle Sam a whipping again some day. I don't believe anything has held it together since but television and the media willingness to play along to the extent that the series has become a good career move masquerading as a team event.

I don't believe that those at the snow-fringed summit of the game genuinely feel they need the career move either. When Tiger Woods makes yet another "gaffe" about the million reasons he'd rather do well at Mount Juliet than the Belfry it's worth examining. I believe that Tiger and Duval and a good many other golfers share my view of the Ryder Cup. It's a crock, but dropping out would cause too much PR damage.

I don't believe that the Ryder Cup "transcends the majors" (Sam Torrance) or that it is "golf's showpiece" (Tony Jacklin). Any tournament that by its nature has excluded Bobby Locke, Gary Player, Nick Price, David Frost, Retief Goosen, Vijay Singh, Adam Scott, Greg Norman to name a few, cannot be anything but a sideshow organised to cater for old-world snobberies.

I asked people yesterday what mades them happy about Europe beating America and they all said things like "kicking American butt" or "giving the Yanks a good thrashing." I don't believe that any event the beauty of which is, as Garcia declared the other day, "that the best player in the world can play well and lose" can transcend in a sport which measures excellence so perfectly. I don't believe either that when Sergio kicked his bag and stamped his foot at the sight of Westwood's soft putting miss on the 18th on Saturday that he was filled with the spirit of Team Europe. So there. It's all out and on the table again.

As the scoreboard turned European blue yesterday my pulse scarcely stirred. I cheered Harrington but I always do that. Cheered for McGinley too, always do. Looked out for Mickelson too. Generally, I chilled in my puddle of disenchantment as the high fives went down in the press tent. I sat through yesterday afternoon soaking in it, knowing that the Sports Editor would be distraught, that the paper would feel let down, that I hadn't become a good European or a good golf person.

So why go at all, the Sports Editor will ask in about 22 months' time when it comes to filling out the accreditation forms again. To which the answer is I don't know. Do we have to be for everything we cover? At least can't they give me something to make me more rabidly European. Rabid Americanism has served the world so well after all. Perhaps rabid Europeanism is the answer.