Ryder Cup 2014: The greatest sporting show on earth?

The most apt sporting-event-as-Christmas analogy (I’ll stop going on about Christmas in a minute) involves the Super Bowl, in which the game itself has become almost a support act to the half-time gig, the celebrity fans and the expensive adverts, and is now so overblown its original meaning has almost been forgotten.

Modern Ryder Cups are drenched in hype but the hype is crammed into a relatively narrow time frame. Ryder Cups are short, sharp shocks, unlike cricket or rugby World Cups, which start amid much fanfare but quickly turn into a drizzle of one-sided and largely irrelevant contests and are still chuntering along a month and a half after they kicked off.

Once a Ryder Cup has put all the pomp and pageantry and slightly awkward military-style ceremonies and speeches behind it, its gladiatorial and therefore slightly cruel format – you try making a six-foot putt on the 18th green to nick half a point with thousands watching, plus millions more on TV – is what makes it so gut-churningly brilliant.

Twelve Europeans and 12 Americans going at it over three days with a couple of captain-cum-generals thrown in, drawing up war plans, toying with formations, driving up hills in buggies and surveying battle scenes. When Seve Ballesteros captained Europe at Valderrama in 1997, he resembled Wellington at Waterloo., external