Well, the European and United States Captains announcements are now official. Hopefully we will not hear about the Ryder Cup for another year....fat chance of that!
So let's take a quick look at the process followed by the Euros and the Yanks to decide who will wear the inevitable checked jacket into battle at the 86th ranked American course, Hazeltine National.
The US choice, as you know by now, is the losing 2012 captain, Davis Love III. And the first choice of his four assistant captains is the losing 2006 captain, Tom Lehman. So, the much vaunted "Task Force" has made two decisions both of which are beyond comprehension. Nothing personal and both are very nice guys, but clearly not very good at leading Ryder Cup teams to victory, which would seem to be fairly high on the "Ryder Cup To Do" list. It's right up there with "Don't choose leaky rain jackets" and "Let's visit the golf course ahead of time and practice together!".
So why didn't the "Task Force" pick Fred Couples? He is universally liked (by the players) and has captained three Presidents Cups - oh, that's right and they won all three of those. But, and this is huge, The Presidents Cup is a PGA Tour owned event and the Ryder Cup, when played in the US, is owned by The PGA of America. In the alphabet soup that is professional golf administration, handing the captaincy to Couples would be tantamount to admitting that the Tour was right and the PGA of America was wrong. Forget about winning, this is about something much more important, golf politics.
And in Europe what did they do? That's right five officials and players got in a room, had a beer and decided in two hours that Darren Clarke was the right man for the job - a passionate Ryder Cup loving Irishman, loved by the players and the public. He bleeds Ryder Cup and is the anti DL3 - fun loving, beer drinking, inspirational and all set to continue the European dominance of Samuel Ryder's trophy.
So, once again the European Team find themselves one up and the match is still 18 months away!
