Brian Viner: Ryder Cup looks super to us but is superfluous in US

By the time you read this the first day's business in the 37th Ryder Cup will be done and dusted, and I, the Almighty and Richard Branson willing, will be on the other side of the Atlantic, albeit not in Kentucky where the action is, but a couple of states down and right a bit, in South Carolina. Actually, I'll be pretty close to Kiawah Island, where the United States regained the Ryder Cup in 1991. They say that sport is all about timing and I suppose the same can be said about sportswriting. The right place, 17 years late, is bad timing.

Coincidentally, I was elsewhere in the US during that 1991 Ryder Cup, travelling through Vermont with my girlfriend and, to her consternation, desperately trying to find TV coverage at every inn and bed and breakfast we stayed in. Eventually I found it on some remote sports channel, on a television with such ropy reception that I watched Bernhard Langer's agonising putt to retain the trophy through what looked like a driving mountain-top blizzard. The double whammy of Langer missing the putt and me missing most of what had plainly been one of the most exciting competitions in Ryder Cup history put me in a bad mood for days. Indeed, it remains a surprise that, a couple of years later, the same girlfriend married me.

Two years ago, when the K-Club in Ireland hosted the event, I was back in the States, in Los Angeles. That time I found the golf easily enough on TV but was struck by the negligible coverage, certainly by comparison with that given to football and baseball, in the sports pages of the Los Angeles Times. On the Monday morning there was a small headline on the front page of the sports section – "Europe Pours It On US In Ryder Cup Blowout" turning to page 13 inside. Page 13! Whatever unfolds today and tomorrow at the Valhalla club, we delude ourselves if we think it will register as much more than a blip on the American sporting consciousness. They prefer internecine sporting warfare over there; when your land mass is 3,536,294 square miles, other countries are superfluous, in sport as in life.

It doesn't help, either, that Tiger Woods isn't playing at Valhalla, but then the impact of Tiger on his countrymen is sometimes overstated. The number of Americans who play golf 25 times or more per year actually fell between 2000 and 2005, during which time Woods won eight major championships, from 6.9 million to 4.6 million. Mind you, it's also worth looking at Ireland, which can boast more golf courses per head of population than all countries of the world bar Scotland, New Zealand and Australia, yet where the recent fantastic exploits of Padraig Harrington have not received quite the acclaim they deserve. That's according to another Irish sporting superstar, Brian O'Driscoll, whom I interviewed recently in Dublin. "Harrington has become Ireland's greatest-ever sports hero, without a shadow of a doubt," O'Driscoll told me. "To win three majors in 14 months is phenomenal. But I don't think he's got appropriate adulation from the Irish public."

That's a shame, but then at the end of the day, and even at the end of Ryder Cup weekend, golfers are unlikely objects of adulation. On this side of the Atlantic, almost as much as the other side, we prefer our sporting heroes to run, jump, kick and catch. Still, I love this biennial spectacular for many reasons, not least of which is that it knocks Manchester United and Chelsea off the back pages for a couple of days, and of course because it has facilitated more than a decade of European dominance over America. Unfortunately, that doesn't cause the great American public nearly as much pain as we wish it did.

Catching kids on rebound from too much TV watching

When was the last time you saw kids playing football in the street, or a single child kicking a ball, over and over, against a wall? When I was a teenager, I used to earn pocket money in the school holidays by packing clothes in a warehouse near the docks in Liverpool. There was a scrap of waste ground opposite, and every lunchtime I joined in a lively game of football there with warehouse and office workers from the surrounding streets. That scrap of waste ground is now a multi-storey car park. Similarly, the young Bobby Charlton learnt his skills by booting an old tennis ball around the backyard; his counterpart today prefers to propel balls via a games console.

All of which brings me to the Rebound Box, infinitely better for a child's development than an X-Box. I came across the Rebound Box in my lofty capacity as assistant coach of my 13-year-old son's Sunday football team, and we've now got two in our back garden. They are not quite boxes but ridged metal panels, designed so that the ball rebounds at speed, making the first touch vital. They might even be better than Cissie Charlton's old back-yard wall. And Aston Villa have just taken loads for their training ground, so my boys are in good company. Take a look at http://uk.youtube. com/watch?v=h6Qcr2oeVGY

Owner's inflated plea of poverty beggars belief

The Everton chairman, Bill Kenwright, recently told fans that he, as a mere millionaire, could not take the club forward; it needs a billionaire. Nobody can dispute that in these crazy times, but then came this cri de coeur from Newcastle owner Mike Ashley (worth an estimated £1.4bn): "I am Mike Ashley, not Mike Ashley a multibillionaire with unlimited resources. Newcastle United and I can't do what other clubs can. We can't afford it." I can't wait for Roman Abramovich to start crying poverty.

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