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Ryder Cup: A case of French indigestion
by Robert Green
October 29, 2018
Further to my blog three of weeks ago about the all-American hangover from the recent Ryder Cup match in Versailles, including an alleged physical spat between American team-mates Brooks Koepka (the current world No. 1) and Dustin Johnson (the former world No. 1), the French have an aftermath attitude of their own.
- Matthew Harris / TGPL
Three days after the match ended, the weekly satirical magazine Le Canard enchainé (think of it as their version of Private Eye) published a story under the headline ‘Au fond du golf pas très clair’, which roughly means ‘When you get to the bottom of it nothing about golf is clear’. The article pointed out that it had cost the country around €42 million to stage what a French friend of mine called “a British event in Paris”. (Even the catering came from the UK.) Sure, the grandstands were packed but mostly for the benefit of foreigners – “Les rosbifs sont venus en nombre. Les Français, moins.” Which you’ll probably get means the British came in their numbers but the French less so. Oh well, c’est la vie. Maybe the event will have inspired thousands of French kids to take up the game and the results of that will be seen a decade or two down la rue.Of course, it was not only that the French were outnumbered by the Brits. There wasn’t a home player on the European team. This wasn’t supposed to be the case when Victor Dubuisson won two and a half points from the three he contested in the previous match to be played in Europe, at Gleneagles in 2014. For the formerly 15th best player in the world, the trajectory then seemed to be certain to be unremittingly upwards. Instead, in the year he was tagged to be the host country’s star player in the biggest team golf competition on the planet, he made certain he wouldn’t be taking part by only playing one tournament in the whole of this year, at least so far: the Spanish Open in April, where he missed the cut.
Still, if he had played in the match last month, the writer at Le Canard may have had a little less of a beef about les rosbifs.
You can follow me on Twitter @robrtgreen and also on my other blog: f-factors.com
