Ryder Cup: Forget the Wags – it’s time for Bahs at Solheim Cup

Had a quick chat with a boxer this week. She was heading off to the gym for another training session but was so choked with a cold it sounded like she had bundles of cotton wool inserted up her nostrils.

Offers of sympathy were waved away. She was, she said, euphoric that it had arrived now and not next month when she has a fight.

None of us wants to be afflicted by the sniffles on a red letter day, like the luckless Donald Trump was during that debate, but if you’re having jabs and uppercuts and hooks and the like coming your way, you could do with being clear-headed.

So, off she went coughing and spluttering to the gym for her latest session when the rest of us might have been wrapped up in a blanket in front of the telly downing Lemsip and drowning in self-pity.

Hardy folk.

And then there was Katie Taylor on the Twitter machine posting photos of herself back in the gym and hard at work, when after her Rio experience you’d imagine she wouldn’t want to see the inside of one until the new year at least.

“It’s redemption time,” she said. Unbowed.

Another click and there's a gem of a piece in the Irish Examiner from Mary White about Briege Corkery's halftime chat with her Cork team-mates during last Sunday's All-Ireland final.

They’d been poor in that first half, and they knew if they didn’t up their game they could bid adieu to that six-in-a-row.

Two photos on the floor

So Corkery, White wrote, placed two photos on the floor of the dressing room, the first of a distraught Juliet Murphy after Cork lost to Tyrone in the 2010 quarter-finals, the second of goalkeeper Martina O’Brien joyously celebrating at full-time after Cork came back from 10 points down to beat Dublin in the 2014 final.

“We can either be that person, or we can be that person,” she said, pointing at the photos.

Needless to say, Cork went out and won.

And Corkery and Rena Buckley collected just their 17th All-Ireland winning medals. Relentless, as White called her book about the team, is the only word.

Another click. A story about Corkery’s former team-mate Valerie Mulcahy, who retired in April after winning 10 All-Ireland football titles with Cork. At 33, time to wind down and rest her weary feet. But?

She’s just signed for Cork City, her idea of taking it easy just switching codes. Indefatigable.

Click. There’s Leona Maguire winning the European Ladies’ Amateur Golf Ranking’s gold medal for the second successive year.

You’re feeling old, it’s 10 years since she finished third at the World Golf Championship at Pinehurst. The under-12 World Golf Championship, that is.

She’s only 21 but already has a decade of competition behind her, and will more than likely be amassing trophies for another two.

Click.

“Pitch and Putt your way around our sexy Golf WAGS gallery, featuring a bunker of babes including Pollyanna Woodward!”

Ah gawd no. It’s that time again.

“There are only two types of women,” the doodler Pablo Picasso once proclaimed, “goddesses and doormats.”

So, after reading about all these sporting goddesses this week we can probably now anticipate our biennial helping of the poor auld WAGs being dubbed dutiful doormats.

"And flight attendants and blonde bimbos," as Davis Love once complained after especially unkind coverage of the American wives and girlfriends, the Guardian later getting their calculator out and revealing that 79 per cent of them were blonde, as opposed to 78 per cent of the Europeans.

This totting up hinted at a certain prejudice because it implied that the Europeans were one per cent smarter.

Brave soul

One of this year’s blondes is Paulina Gretzky, Dustin Johnson’s beloved, but it would be a brave soul who would dub her a doormat, although Hillary Clinton might suggest she stands by her man like Tammy Wynette.

(Some have sweepingly suggested, incidentally, that there will be as many votes for Hillary from this year’s US Ryder Cup team and their partners as there have been US Ryder Cup triumphs since 2008).

“Listen here you hating piece of shit trolls,” wrote Paulina on Instagram during the summer when Johnson was criticised for skipping the Olympics.

“I’ll say it once – he didn’t work his ass off his entire life for a gold medal he achieved his MAJOR and let everyone else do what they need to do and leave my fanf***ingtastic man alone.”

When you look at this 1949 photo of the wives of the American Ryder Cup setting off for Scarborough on the SS Queen Elizabeth (photograph above), like you do, you might struggle to imagine any of them warning off detractors of their fanf***ingtastic men, although we could be underestimating them.

Besides, the woman second from right appears to have a deceased gorilla draped over her shoulders, so she might have been capable of anything.

It was a writer in the London Independent a couple of years back who suggested that the "parading of Ryder Cup wives" was "on the same spectrum" as a woman who was in "solitary confinement in the hellhole of an Iranian prison for watching a volleyball match", which seemed quite an extreme comparison.

Others, meanwhile, have argued that until Solheim Cup boyfriends and husbands (Bahs) are paraded in the same fashion, women will never truly be free. And if that Solheim Cup day ever comes, it’d be on a par with Bill Clinton becoming the First boy Lady.

What is forgotten in all this weighty analysis is one important thing: this is golf we’re talking about, so you have to be patient. There’ll most probably be Bunkers of Babes for a while yet.

It’ll be over by Sunday night, though, so hang in there, then we can all get back to the fanf***ingtastic sporting goddesses.