2004 Ryder Cup and Public Morality

What our country's defeat in the golf matches teaches us about ethics

In the middle of September 2004, 12 men on each side of the Atlantic Ocean, all of them supremely proficient at the striking of little white balls, assembled in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, for the 35^th Ryder Cup International Golf Matches.

Europe defeated the United States 18 1/2 to 9 1/2, an unprecedented rout of the best American players including Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Davis Love III, and other major tournament champions.  Golf analysts everywhere have talked about it for several weeks.

Everyone has a theory: the Americans were too tight, had insufficient rest between The President's Cup—another international match format where the Americans compete against non-Europeans in non-Ryder Cup years—, US players function more as independent contractors, they aren't used to being in a teamwork setting, the qualification period is too long (two years vs. one year for the Euros), the captain made nonoptimum-chemistry pairings…

…and nobody ate his Wheaties!

As usual, grains of truth can be found in most of the expert assessments.

Still, when you lose, only two reasons exist: either you played too poorly to win, or your opponent played well enough to beat you.  Naturally, the analysts have to come up with some deeper stuff to justify their paychecks, though a lot of their deeper stuff is enlightening.

As a budding Web pundit concerned with issues of morality in a political context, I would like to take this opportunity to weigh in with my three cents (<- inflation):

A seemingly wild assertion, to be sure.  In other words, it's our fault.  Well, your fault.  I mean the fault of the many Americans who have become rabid sports fans, who over the decades have come to practically deify professional athletes—including PGA Tour golfers—and in the process have:

1. segregated athletic activity from normal life, encouraging lazy, illusory, and vicarious experience of sport instead of active participation
2. devoted excessive attention to the professional athlete on the order of adulation, setting up unrealistic expectations and a rash of "choking" by the professionals

Preoccupation with sports has intensified to the point of cultural addiction.  Evidence lies in the extravagant salaries paid to professional athletes of average ability and the increase in problem sports gambling.  We also see it in recruiting systems that target young talent from poor neighborhoods channeling them into the sports-stardom "lottery"(1).  This, as opposed to having them learn real-life skills of English and math.

When did the process of wretched excess in sport begin?

I speculate it began with post-WW2 prosperity, the Baby Boom, television, and football (particularly the Super Bowl).  In personal terms, when I grew up in the 1950s, the average sports professional fell into the same income bucket as my hardworking, white-collar dad.  Today, the average sports professional's income is 10 to 20 times a middle-class worker's income.

Back to point 1) throughout the Century of World Statism (in America, CWS started with the income tax in 1913) we began turning more and more power and responsibility over to government.  This trend of offloading our personal and communal responsibilities—self-defense, health, education, welfare, transportation, commerce—to an omnipotent state has now reached the threshold of our ability to sustain a freeman's existence.

"A government that can do everything for you can do anything to you."

The American mantra now seems to be:

Don't pursue excellence in life.  "Let George do it"… and cough up George's exorbitant service fees!

Nowhere is the selling out of personal excellence more apparent than in yielding our living energies to the government, letting the state take over, paying through the nose, and irrationally hoping for the best.  The same thing we see in sports addiction.

Forsaking excellence lies at the root of the decline of public morals.

The concept of public morality often has the connotation of sexual propriety, but the broader interpretation is "setting a good example."  When one decides not to be the engine of one's own fulfillment in life, basically one gets lazy.  Lazy people become obese (though, of course, not all fat people are lazy).  By the way, obesity has reached epidemic proportions in this country, easily public-health enemy number 1.

Lazy people also tend to overmedicate.  Bill Maher the other night on HBO's Real Time reported a study that claims more than 11 million American children are on antidepressant or other mood-modulating drugs.  11 MILLION!!  Instead of meeting the challenges of life, kids are given "the divine right of euphoria."  We don't have an illegal drug problem; we have a legal drug problem.

Finally, lazy people are disposed to be rude, crude, and unattractive.

Last Saturday I was driving home on a residential street.  An 80s-era Buick Electra or some such big ol' car careens to a position in front of me from a side street without so much as a brake light.  The teenage-boy driver throws a pop bottle and a paper bag from his window… then a few minutes later his little teenage-passenger "ho" casually tosses an entire picnic table of debris out her side.

A one-car litter brigade: the epitome of rude, crude, and unattractive.

Have you ever walked along a city street in America—urban, suburban, or rural?  Any visitor would conclude garbage chucking is the national pastime.  Trash throwing trash.  I'd call it a display of the public morality of pigs but that'd be a gratuitous insult to a fine animal.

Fat, drugged out, and filthy—the American Way!

Well it doesn't have to be that way.  The solution is to reclaim our freedom and our individual pursuit of excellence—everyone, not just jocks.  Quit taking the easy way out and being okay with it.  Face reality and don't flinch.  Work your ass off.  And think.

Then the true American spirit so long masked will be restored.

Sport then becomes a celebration of life, not a substitute for it.  And our best athletes aren't exalted beyond reason.  In terms of performance they'll be less susceptible to a) tightening up from unrealistic popular expectations or b) getting complacent from the currently absurd material trappings attending modest achievement.

In terms of Ryder Cup, the Americans will be closer to the people and closer among themselves.  Then they will contend consistently against the Europeans.