Adrenaline is a relic of evolution — the key that unlocks humans’ “fight or flight” instinct. Under stress or perceived danger, the brain triggers adrenaline’s release. What follows is a dramatic series of physiological changes designed to accomplish one thing: survival. The lungs quickly absorb more oxygen; the heart rate soars; muscles contract more quickly. Oxygen-soaked blood floods the major muscle groups, which already are primed to respond. Under particularly high bursts of adrenaline, the major muscle groups twitch uncontrollably. Legs shake.
Justin Thomas prepares to tee off for his singles match against Rory McIlroy, beneath more than 6,000 spectators at the 2018 Ryder Cup in France. Credit: PGA of America.
Stress exists at every opening tee shot in golf, especially at its biggest tournaments. But the Ryder Cup’s first tee stands above all others. In his book The First Major, John Feinstein described the first tee at the Ryder Cup as “the most cherished moment of terror in golf.” On the night before the 1993 Ryder Cup began, as Feinstein tells tale, U.S. captain Tom Watson warned his team that the Ryder Cup “is the only event in golf where your legs will shake on the first tee;” the next morning, Watson asked Tom Kite to hit his pairing’s opening shot because Kite’s alternate-shot partner, Ryder Cup rookie Davis Love III, could not stop his legs from shaking.
The first tee isn’t the only stressful setting at the Ryder Cup, of course. On Sunday in 1991, Bernhard Langer missed a six-foot putt on the 18th green to cost Europe its first loss in eight years; he walked off the course in tears. But for the Ryder Cup’s three-day earthquake of chance, pain, joy, and hope, the first tee is the epicenter. It is the place where two years of anticipation — and, for some players, a lifetime of dreams — bubble to the surface, with every player at one point or another caught between thousands of screaming voices and a little white ball that isn’t going to hit itself. Everything begins there, and no one can avoid it.
“You become something you’re really not,” 1993 Ryder Cup player Jim Gallagher, Jr., said. “You become this other person.”
Today, the first tee is bigger than ever — literally. In 2018, the first-tee grandstands at Le Golf National in France sat 6,500 fans; that’s about a thousand more than the bleachers at Wrigley Field. It’s louder than ever, and maybe more stressful than ever. But it’s never been easy.
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By the time the 1985 Ryder Cup began, Hal Sutton had won five PGA Tour events, including a Players Championship and a PGA Championship. His two Tour wins that year both had gone to playoffs, and he’d begun the final round of the Masters just four shots back.
But he’d never been as nervous as he was on the Ryder Cup’s first tee.
“I didn’t know what it was like,” Sutton said. “All I’d done is dream about being on the Ryder Cup team.”
Eight years later, Jim Gallagher, Jr., finished his normal warmup routine ahead of the 1993 Ryder Cup’s Friday afternoon session. He walked to the first tee and posed for a picture. Everything was fine. Until his name was announced.
“And when they announced my name,” Gallagher said, “it was like your brain goes blank and everything starts speeding up.”
In the unruly world of pro sports, thousands of screaming voices are usually unremarkable. But in golf, the scene is alien. At virtually every other golf tournament in the world, a fan’s chief responsibility is to stay quiet. At the Ryder Cup, though, the script flips: chaos is both expected and accepted. To Gallagher, the setting was more akin to a Saturday night in Neyland Stadium.
The par-3 14th hole at Kiawah Island’s Ocean Course, host of the 1991 Ryder Cup.
“It does feel a lot like the corner end zone of a football stadium,” said Kevin Van Valkenburg, whose work as an ESPN senior writer has included covering both the NFL and the 2016 and 2018 Ryder Cups. “The stands are way higher than they’d normally be at any golf event, so at first you get out and the highest seats feel vast like you’re far away. But the grandstand is so tall that it holds the sound in and makes it raucous.”
The noise is only part of it, of course. There is the pressure of representing your homeland. There is the awkwardness of solo athletes suddenly becoming teammates. There is the two years’ worth of anxiety built up around the hope of redemption. There is the stress of first-time participants desperate to prove that they belong.
But it is something more, too. The Ryder Cup is not the only international team competition held biennially in front of partisan fans. But no one risks fainting at the Presidents Cup. Sutton played two Walker Cups, but he acknowledges that it’s not the same. There is something different about the Ryder Cup. There is energy, anticipation, fear, and anxiety — and they all converge at the first tee.
“When we got to the first tee and they said my name,” Gallagher said, “I didn’t know if I could get the ball on the tee.”
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Pressure isn’t felt monolithically: it can create oil, or it can create diamonds.
Feinstein tells that Keegan Bradley began hyperventilating on the practice green at the 2012 Ryder Cup just before his first start, an alternate-shot match against Luke Donald and Sergio Garcia. “Don’t worry, Keegan,” his partner, Phil Mickelson, told him. “Luke and Sergio have never lost a foursomes match. Nothing to be nervous about.” Minutes later on the first tee, with Bradley only seconds away from his tee shot at Medinah’s opening par-4, Mickelson tightened the screws even more. “Keegan, I don’t want 8-iron into this green. I don’t want 9-iron,” Mickelson said, as Bradley later recalled to David Feherty. “I want sand wedge.”
Somehow, Bradley piped his drive. Mickelson hit his sand wedge to tap-in distance, and Bradley drained his putt for birdie. He and Mickelson won the match 4 and 3.
Sutton has a theory. “I think some guys just don’t give a shit,” Sutton said.
He’s not wrong. The very concept of “fight or flight” denotes that people respond to stress-induced adrenaline bursts in different ways: some fight, and some fly. Some people revel under pressure. Others wilt. It’s biology.
“In sports, especially as sportswriters, we probably overrate the ability to play under pressure and assign it to character,” Van Valkenburg said. “It’s probably not fair.”
Still, it’s real — so real that the idea of home field advantage becomes presumptuous.
“Honestly, I think it might be easier on the visitors than it is on the home team, because you don’t want to let everybody down,” Sutton said. “People are vocal in the world today, and you don’t want to do anything that’s gonna cause them to get more vocal — except in a positive way. Everybody gets a little nervous around that; if they say they don’t, then I think down deep they’re lying.”
But the nervousness that the first tee creates doesn’t have to be a liability.
The 12th green at Bethpage Black, which will host the 2024 Ryder Cup.
In 1999, the United States 10-6 on Sunday morning; as defending champion, Europe needed just four points from 12 singles matches to retain the Cup. In a last, desperate effort to mount a charge, the U.S. front-loaded its lineup in the hope that early momentum would crush the Europeans’ spirits in the final, decisive matches.
The American team came primed, with nothing to lose. And then, there were the fans.
“That’s the most electric day that I’ve ever had on a golf course, period,” Sutton said.
The Americans needed a fast start, and they got it: they won their first six matches, turning an enormous four-point deficit into a 12-10 lead. Not long afterward, Justin Leonard secured a half-point from José María Olazábal to clinch the Cup.
The improbable outcome would have been impossible without the U.S.’s fast start — and the fast start, perhaps, would not have happened without the American fans’ partisan support at the first tee.
“The way we all got started off — we needed to win all six, and we were up big,” Sutton said. “The crowd got into that. But they were into it when we got to the first tee; the crowd was doing their part being enthusiastic, being optimistic.”
For now, there is at least an outside chance that an American Ryder Cup team might have to brave the 2020 event without that support. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, Whistling Straits in Wisconsin remains scheduled to host the Ryder Cup from September 25-27, and the PGA of America has admitted that a tournament without fans is one option under consideration. And European team captain Padraig Harrington hasn’t exactly shot the idea down.
But if adrenaline is the Ryder Cup first tee’s key ingredient, and if fans are the spark that lights that fire, then the scene at a first tee without fans would be plain.
“It just brings out emotions in people. You’ve gotta have fans,” Gallagher said. “Otherwise it’s just a bunch of guys playing.”
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Banner photo: credit PGA of America
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