Ryder Cup Rivals Book Review

Ryder Cup Rivals
By Hank Gola
Grade: B+
Comments from teachers: a very detailed view of thirteen important Ryder Cup competitions from 1927 to 2016.

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Ryder Cup Rivals The reader takes through the history of the Ryder Cup through the lens of thirteen crucial competitions. The book opens with the First Ryder Cup in 1927 and ends with the 2016 matches in Hazeltine.

Author Hank Gola is an experienced Sportswriter, who has treated Pro Voetbal and Golf for forty years for the New York Daily News and New York Post. As you would expect, the book was well investigated and written tightly. It deals with the captains, the players, the game on the course and-like the most important-context in the general arch of the Ryder Cup story.

The sketch of that overall arch is probably reasonably well known at Golffans. The American team dominated the team of Great Britain and Ireland was expanded with continental Europe. Since 1985, Europe has gone 13-6 in the United States.

What readers will find Ryder Cup Rivals Are the details of that bow. The 1927 matches kicked the whole thing and set the stage for decades of American dominance. The 1937 matches introduced a generation of dominant players, including Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, Sam Snead and Ralph Guldahl. The 1947 matches brought the series new life into life. In 1957 the Ryder Cup produced a rare British victory and introduced the world to Dai Rees, who was before Seve. Nineteen-sixty-nine was the year of the concession. The Ryder Cup from 1985 was the start of the tilt to the Europeans. In 1991 the relatively sympathetic competition became grim with the ‘war on the coast’. Seve, the spirit of the European team as a player, captain in 1997. In Brookline in 1999 the audience became part of the story, perhaps at the expense of the competition. Paul Azinger thought out-of-the-box for an American victory in Valhalla in 2008. In 2012, Medinah made a crushing loss for the American team. Rory and Patrick Reed had a competition for the ages in 2016 in Hazeltine.

For my money, the most interesting Ryder Cup match took place in 1947 – and it has nothing to do with the actual competition. The Ryder Cup was of course put on hold during the Second World War, but it was certainly not certain that it would resume as soon as the axis surrendered. To be honest, the team of Great Britain could not afford it in the midst of national reconstruction and rationing.

In De Step, Robert Hudson, a grocer in Oregon who paid all the costs of the British team, with the reservation that the competition is held in the Portland Golf Club. Hudson treated the British team as royalties, and for many years later, team members sent large fruit baskets for Christmas, a welcome gesture, while Great Britain was rated until 1954.

Hudson actually saved the Ryder Cup, even if the Portland competitions were less than ideal. (I wrote about this in 2008. Read the man who saved the Ryder Cup).

In any case, Gola offers a little too many details on the thirteen Ryder cups he chose to emphasize. On almost 400 pages it was actually a bit much at the end. Furthermore, the accounts of the more recent competitions had fewer of those moments of discovery that attracted me with the earlier. While a story of Azinger’s “POD System” was Old Hat, for example, I found it interesting that the 1957 matches were the first in which the host captain (Dai Rees) prepared the course to favor their side. The format changed in 1969. Fourball was considered an ‘American game’, but the British and then the Europeans dominated. Ray Floyd In 1989 was the first American captain to get ‘Captain’s Picks’, who had had the Europeans for a while.

In the end I had kept less news.

Still, I generally thought Ryder Cup Rivals Was a good read. I recommend it for Golffans who want to learn part of the history of the greatest competition of the game.