Bluegrass state prefers riders to Ryder

THE Americans are good at pretending they don’t care about winning.

“I am here to see good golf,” has been a popular musing during the practice sessions.

So frequent and so uniform, their assertions border on believable. And their green-side shrugs are backed up by a general indifference outside the grounds.

Besides a decorated strip along one block of Fourth Street in the centre of Louisville, the fact that the city is hosting one of the world’s largest sporting events has been kept low-key. If anything, after 2006, organisers found the only place on earth more devoted to horseracing than Kildare.

The city is awash with reminders of the annual Kentucky Derby, held at nearby Churchill Downs, and it is not prepared to relinquish its love for anything on two legs.

It is fair to say if there were 24 mares negotiating the walnut trees and creeks at Valhalla, the action might not need to be put in perspective for the seemingly hesitant public.

“[It] is the Superbowl of golf,” screamed the headline in the Louisville Courier Journal. It went on to point out that while the Derby is bigger than each individual day of the Ryder Cup the entire week makes the golf competition a larger draw.

Karl Schmitt, director of the entertainment focused Cup Fest, said sports fans had to tend to their priorities first. And on this side of the Atlantic this includes a fanatical support for college football.

“People need to get past the Olympics and the UK [University of Kentucky] — U of L [University of Louisville] football game and now they are thinking about the Ryder Cup,” he said this weekend.

Between the nags and the pigskin it would appear Samuel Ryder’s 17-inch trophy has not captured Kentucky’s imagination as it did Ireland’s two years ago.

Or at least not yet — racing folk always know when it is time to lay money down and before then you look for clues.

Even if Europe has beaten America for fun since the millennium the boisterous scenes at Brookline in 1999 are a reminder of what winning means. And the grandstand crowds following the Americans around during practice this week, compared with the scant support for the Europeans, indicate where hearts really lie.

In addition 3,600 people have paid €150 to volunteer as working marshals for the week and another 1,000 were turned away. Certainly the aloofness is not expected to dwell long beyond today’s opening ceremony.

And Cup Fest plans to kill any lingering hesitation at the USA pep-rally in downtown Louisville tonight.

Kentuckian golf fan Joe Doherty said the outward apathy among supporters around Valhalla will be forgotten about if Europe stumbles over the weekend hurdles — although he expects a more courteous celebration than Brookline among home fans.

“Americans just do not like to lose and even if people are not golf fans everything changes when you put USA on the side of something,” he said.

With such an abysmal record over the past 15 years, it is understandable the veneer is holding.

This after all is racing country and even if they seem relaxed you can never tell exactly what the punters invested until their horse comes within sight of the line.