Paris match: Can Europe unite to hold off the USA’s Ryder Cup raiders?

Samuel Ryder’s biennial golfing challenge has become perhaps the most potent example of Europe coming together in a common cause. But America’s golden generation will arrive in France as hot favourites

The US team celebrated in Hazeltine in 2016 – and they’ll be fancied to retain the trophy in September (Getty)

In 1983, long before the Ryder Cup became the world-famous, money-printing amusement park of its modern incarnation, the ABC television network in the United States offered the organisers a grand total of $1m. Not to buy the rights – they already owned those – but to try and get rid of them. So toxic was the Ryder Cup brand, so uninterested were the viewing public, that ABC were actually trying (and failing) to pay not to broadcast it.

All of which should offer a certain perspective on just how far we have come in a generation. In September, the world’s biggest team golf competition will alight on Le Golf National course in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, around 15 miles west of Paris. It will be only the second time the biennial USA v Europe match has visited continental Europe, a fact that in itself gives some indication of just how coveted it is among prospective hosts: not just a blue-chip sporting event guaranteed to attract a global television audience and a cash-rich clientele, but essentially a three-day tourism advert, where it is not merely tickets and beer being sold, but an entire country.

France is not one of golf’s heartlands. No French male golfer has won a major championship in more than 100 years. If you were to compile a list of the most popular sports in the country, golf might just about sneak into the top 10, still struggling to shift the perception that it is a sport for the rich. But they fought off five other countries to secure the hosting rights to the 42nd Ryder Cup, seeing a unique opportunity to build a lasting legacy and establish themselves as a bona fide golfing nation.

The good thing is that you won’t have to learn too much new lingo. Apart from “aigle” (eagle), “albatros” (albatross) and “oiselet” (birdie), most French golf terms simply involve reciting the English word in a slightly silly accent. And with the tournament taking place just outside one of the world’s most iconic cities, a short hop from the ornate Palace of Versailles, France will be banking on a sizeable influx of both golfing and non-golfing traffic this September.

What of the actual golf? Well it is one of the truisms of the Ryder Cup that there is always one team who cares about it more than the other. For most of its history, that team has been Great Britain, and after that Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and after that Europe. The ill-tempered shenanigans at Brookline in 1999, when crotch-thrusting jingoism flowed into the burgeoning stream of Bush-era anti-Americanism, unwittingly created an entire generation of European golfing patriots.

The result was an unprecedented era of European dominance. Until America broke their rotten run in Minnesota in 2016, Europe had won eight editions out of 10. For the first time this century, however, it is possible to identify a shift. Following their humiliation at Gleneagles in 2014, the PGA of America set up a Ryder Cup Task Force, consisting of current players and former captains, to address its slide. The result is that America, this time under the supervision of the taciturn but determined Jim Furyk, are finally taking the Ryder Cup seriously again. And they have a pretty frightening arsenal of talent with which to do so.

Paris could well see the blooming of America’s golden generation.

Jordan Spieth, Rickie Fowler, Justin Thomas, Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed will form the core of a side who are all still in their 20s and early 30s, all good friends, all clogging the upper reaches of the world rankings. All have come through the college golf system, with its strong matchplay element, and have honed and chiselled their team golf skills in the Presidents Cup. You could scarcely manufacture a more efficient Ryder Cup-winning machine.

Meanwhile, Europe’s big beasts over the last generation – Lee Westwood, Henrik Stenson, Justin Rose, Ian Poulter, Sergio Garcia – are all, if not quite receding into the sunset, then beginning to feel their age. There are high hopes for the next batch, players like Jon Rahm, Tyrrell Hatton and Matt Fitzpatrick, and with four picks instead of three, captain Thomas Bjorn should be able to avoid the situation of two years ago, where half of the 12-man team had never played in a Ryder Cup before.

One of those picks will almost certainly go to a French player, probably the promising, if California-born, Alexander Levy. Even so, a good deal of responsibility will rest on the senior players like Rose, Garcia and the irrepressible Rory McIlroy, whose sparkling duel with Reed in 2016 was one of the greatest singles matches this competition had ever seen.

There is a certain irony in the fact that of all the sports, it is golf, with its traditional inclination towards the well-off, middle-aged white male demographic, that has most thoroughly embraced the collective European ideal. This is not merely a point of trivia. Against the backdrop of a fraught Brexit and a fracturing continent, here, perhaps, is a timely reminder of the power of Europe as a unifying ideal. Even if it’s only every two years, and because we’re all desperate to stick it to the Americans. These days, we have to be thankful for small mercies.