Try telling these the Ryder Cup is just another event

For so many years, it was anything but a competition, so it’s useless to say what was at the heart of the Ryder Cup.

Something to do, perhaps. A week every other year to break up the monotony of tournaments? Tip back a few with golfers from Britain and Ireland with whom you have very little connection?

So the Americans won 18, lost three times and tied once in the first 22 editions of the Ryder Cup. Who cared?

But the last 16 matches, or since in 1979 it became the US against Europe? It has surely mattered and people have certainly cared. More so in Europe, for sure.

“It’s massive to Europe. It’s important Europe wins,” Pádraig Harrington said. It was just two days after he failed to earn one of the two captain’s picks afforded to Jose Maria Olazabal, but Harrington felt not an ounce of bitterness. Instead, he spoke of his passion for the matches and how he would be back in Ireland, glued to the television set, cheering wildly for Europe.

Compare that to the mood of an American, who like Harrington did not earn a captain’s pick. Hunter Mahan said he was so dejected he didn’t think he would even watch.

Call me naive, but there’s a chance those reactions hit at what is still at the heart of the Ryder Cup: It means more to the Europeans. That is why it’s never been difficult for this American to wish them good cheer for their significantly better play of late. Europe has won four of the last five and nine of the last 13. Good gracious, the Ryder Cup is virtually attached to European soil.

But whereas there was never a thread of reason to the American domination decades ago, other than to concede the chaps from the US of A were better than their GB&I counterparts, few will argue what has defined the European quest: To show the golf world that their tour deserved due recognition.

For many years, it was an easy cause to rally around, for the American tour was mostly for, well, Americans, and the European tour was for everybody else. It was the true “world tour” and when he boarded a plane in Europe to fly to the US for the 1999 Ryder Cup, Scotsman Paul Lawrie was among his “brothers” from Northern Ireland and Spain, Sweden and Ireland, France and England. If there was a common cause, it was this: They lived in Europe, played in Europe, believed in Europe.

Fast-forward 13 years and Lawrie is part of his second Ryder Cup, only this time the makeup is different. Only Lawrie and three teammates — Martin Kaymer, Francesco Molinari, Nicolas Colsaerts – don’t have membership on the American PGA Tour, and nine of the 12 Europeans have residences in the US.

But if you suggest that perhaps the knot that has always kept them together is slipped, think again.

“It means too much to Europe,” said Englishman Ian Poulter, who lives in Florida. “We are all good friends, on both sides of the pond, but for three days there is a divide.”

Perhaps what inspires today’s European players is all this talk of them living and playing in the US and that they’ve perhaps forgotten their roots. Some players bristle at that.

“I wouldn’t say I consider myself American,” said Englishman Luke Donald, educated in the US and settled for at least part of the year in nearby Chicago.

“I’ve tried to stay true to where I was brought up,” he added.

So while Donald has taken advantage of the professional opportunities America has provided him, he plays his heart out for what Europe means to him.