The Dumpster Fire
Will Be Televised
Can check: Parish Brewing Oktoberfest
In-brain soundtrack: “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down” (Kris Kristofferson)
Golf hole living rent-free in my brain: Bethpage Black’s third (par-3, 230 yards from the tips, 158 yards from the middle tees)
. . .
The Ryder Cup is this weekend, which means it’s time for American golf fans’ biennial reminder that systemic negligence, arbitrary decision making, and incompetent leadership is a recipe for a dumpster fire. (This is not exclusive to golf, incidentally.)
After two painful days at Bethpage Black in New York, Team Europe leads 11½ to 4½, needing only three points on Sunday to win their eighth Ryder Cup win in the past 11 meetings. Once again, the U.S. team is — on paper, at least — the stronger side. And once again, the Europeans have outplayed the U.S. from the drop, and the Americans’ top-ranked players have laid eggs.
Superior talent does not lose so consistently unless something is consistently wrong.
So what is it, then?
As with any systemic failure, there are probably a lot of causes. The culture contrast between European golf and American golf is well documented. But it’s hard to believe that Tommy Fleetwood’s record as one of this era’s greatest Ryder Cup players comes from having played more alternate shot when he was 7 years old.
The issue is not that the Europeans play out of their minds every two years. The issue is why — or, more specifically, why the Americans perform below their typical talent levels.
Ultimately, in any systemic failure, the system’s architects and operators bear more responsibility than the people working under that system. In the case of the Ryder Cup, that brings us to the PGA of America. Who exactly is picking the U.S. side’s ineffectual captains? Who’s responsible for confirming that something resembling a plan is in place? Who’s responsible for for deciding how many captain’s picks will make the team? In team-sports parlance, the PGA is effectively somewhere between a general manager and an owner. Remember what happened when the Washington Commanders finally shed themselves from Daniel Snyder? Yeah.
I’m not optimistic that anything will change any time soon; after all, the people who’d have to rebuild the system are the ones who built it in the first place. A decade after the “task force,” the U.S. is back where it was after the 2014 debacle: an arbitrarily selected captain overseeing a talented team that looks anything but.
With any sense, the PGA would make a full 180. Hire a non-golf captain, like Nick Saban or Kim Mulkey. Declare any player with a losing record after two Ryder Cups to be ineligible. Turn “captain’s” picks into committee picks — ideally, by a committee filled by as many people as possible who have never had anything to do with the Ryder Cup. Remember the wise words of Jerry Seinfeld: if every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.
None of this will happen, of course. Two years from now, the U.S. team will roll into another whimsically chosen captain ready and eager to ignore every data-driven option and Go With His Gut for three days, en route to another massacre. Maybe U.S. fans should go with the data too, and stop deluding themselves into expecting any other outcome.