Love III Riles The Golf Gods

Captain Love III has already called his 2016 Ryder Cup team the best golf team ever. Two thoughts.  First,  the golf gods,  like most gods in the cosmos,  do not look kindly on hubris.  Perhaps not coincidentally,  Ladbrokes has just offered attractive odds for the proposition  that the mojo for the 2016 Ryder Cup has moved over to the Europeans. Secondly, Love  does not appear to be much of a historian.  

How about the 1971 Ryder Cup team which featured Jack Nicklaus, the late, iconic Arnold Palmer, Lee Trevino, Billy Casper and Gene Littler, all World Golf Hall of Fame members if not all-time greats.  Aside from these golf legends, the remaining seven members of the 1971 Ryder Cup team accumulated 58 PGA tour victories between them.

What about the  1975 Ryder Cup team which featured Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Johnny Miller, Billy Casper, Raymond Floyd,  Hale Irwin and  Gene Littler, all World Golf Hall of Fame members,  as well as Tom Weiskopf,  who belongs in the World Golf Hall of Fame (along with Tony Lema.  See my earlier post urging Champagne Tony's selection here.)  

Or how about the 1981 Ryder Cup team which featured Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino,Tom Watson Raymond Floyd,  Tom Kite, Hale Irwin Ben Crenshaw, Johnny Miller and Larry Nelson (who won three major championships), all nine of whom are  World Golf Hall of Fame members as well as Jerry Pate who won the U.S. Open in 1976.

Of course I would  take my chances with any team that included Jack Nicholas against a squad of the current American golfers.

While it is admirable in general for a coach to want to pump up his team, the U.S. Ryder Cup group is not a true team.  It is an assemblage of golfers  who play an extremely individual sport for a living, thrown together for a very brief period of time, who have no collective interests whatsoever.

And coaches usually talk about how great their opponent is, not their  own team, for fear of providing the opponent with excellent bulletin board material.

Hopefully Love will at least remember sufficient  history to avoid making the same mistakes he made to facilitate the Miracle at Medinah.