For all this, thanks Seve

You want goofy? Here is goofy: In 1967, Jack Nicklaus was the best player in the galaxy, a titan who that summer won the US Open for his sixth Major.

At the age of 27, Nicklaus was unlike anything golf had seen in decades. He was a sensation. But he wasn’t on the American Ryder Cup team.

No, sir. The PGA of America back then had a policy that defies logic. You couldn’t be a Ryder Cupper without having been a member of its organisation for five years. Nicklaus at the time was months shy of his five years.

But no-one waged a write-in campaign to change the rule, hardly anyone raised a stink at all. When an American team without Nicklaus but led by Arnold Palmer, Julius Boros and Billy Casper steamrolled Great Britain & Ireland by the outrageous score of 23½-8½, it was a fifth straight win and the golf world yawned. At that point, there had been 17 editions of the Ryder Cup and the Americans had won 14 of them.

For good reason, aspiring pro golfers born in the 1950s or 1960s hardly could have been expected to forge an attachment to the Ryder Cup, because it was as natural as air. You didn’t think about not having it, because the Americans always owned the Ryder Cup.

Then came the Europeans and an unforgettable man named Seve Ballesteros, who became united with colleagues from Scotland (Sandy Lyle), England (Nick Faldo), Wales (Ian Woosnam), and Germany (Bernhard Langer) in a solitary mission: To take ownership of the Ryder Cup.

They were The Big Five and they succeeded marvellously, so much so that Europe’s passion for the Ryder Cup was indisputably superior to America’s. When the best golfers wearing red, white, and blue lost the Ryder Cup in 1985 for the first time in 28 years, the dam broke. Victories in seven of the next 10 Ryder Cups got the critics in a lather and the charge was put forth: American golfers didn’t care.

Frankly, the critics were right. The majority of those advancing to the PGA Tour level weren’t passionate about the Ryder Cup, mostly because it never was a big deal. We owned it. Ho-hum.

But an intriguing thing has arrived. It took many years to get here from Europe, but an embrace of the Ryder Cup has set in in America.

A generation of American kids who grew up watching Europeans hoist the Ryder Cup have come along and sworn a passion for the event and a commitment to succeed. Brandt Snedeker is one of four Americans born in the 1980s who played for this year’s US Ryder Cup team, the others being Dustin Johnson, Webb Simpson, and Keegan Bradley.

These were kids who saw European wins on US soil in 1987, 1995, and the most humiliating one of all, in 2004. When Bradley, now 26, joined with Phil Mickelson to win pair of matches Friday, he was asked for how long he has been scripting this.

“My whole life,” he said.

With Johnson, 28, and Simpson, 27, Bradley figures to be part of a nucleus that shares a passion for this Ryder Cup that wasn’t a prevalent in America years ago, but is so now. In that respect, losing was the greatest thing that happened to US golf, which is another way of saying that on this side of the pond, we, too, owe an enormous thank you to Seve Ballesteros.

His passion for the Ryder Cup was on display at Medinah Country Club and while it may have been tinged red, white, and blue, we’re sure he would have recognised and appreciated it.