Ryder Cup Adventure: Give Us Your Money!

It wasn't a great day for the European team on Saturday which came as something of a disappointment after the fight back they put in on Friday afternoon. At three points down going into the singles on Sunday, they have a mountain to climb but they did this four years ago when they were even further behind so I remain optimistic that we can still win the coveted trophy.

I had mentioned about the commercialisation of this event in yesterday's dispatch and it is a surprising thing to talk about bearing in mind that this is the only golfing contest where the players don't play for vast sums of money. They actually play for pride and yet behind the passion and the pride, the Ryder Cup has become a massive money making operation, ably shown with everything happening at Hazeltine Golf Club!

Do you know that on Saturday morning before 9am, over 40,000 people had entered the course and the majority of these had been bussed in from Canterbury Park, some 10 miles away from the course? It needs a rather large fleet of buses to cater for those sorts of numbers!

Anybody who knows me will be aware of my passionate hatred of crowds and of queuing but if you want to attend an event of this nature, I'm afraid that the two go hand in hand. Actually, the trip in the morning has been good fun with the banter between the two bands of supporters and helps time pass a bit more quickly while you are waiting. Waiting? Yep, that's a word you use a lot at Hazeltine with some of the worst queues being for the toilets where basically, you have to build in waiting time to ensure you don't experience an unpleasant accident! It's tricky but they have fallen well short of toilet provision for the numbers visiting and I do feel sorry for the ladies who share the same facilities as the men! Suffice to say, they are gross. Enough on that subject and back to commercialisation.

So the take from daily tickets sales alone runs to millions of dollars but as soon as you enter the gates, you are greeted by the sight of a 50,000 square feet "merchandise tent" or perhaps better called, "give us your money tent!" It's all about the money and the prices for Ryder Cup merchandise are crazy. Despite this, the tent is rammed with people offloading their dollars at a vast rate and leaving whilst proudly wearing their $100 golf shirt emblazoned with the Ryder Cup symbol! For me, I got a real bargain with a $5 dollar fridge magnet!

But if they make money there, it's but nothing but compared to the food and beverage operation? Did I use the term, food?? I'm not sure what I have been eating on course for the past two days but it definitely wasn't food!

You aren't allowed to bring a rucksack/backpack into the course and they tend to impose this rigidly because they don't want you to bring proper food, like fruit or meat or even those things not yet discovered in America called vegetables! More importantly, they want you to pay the grossly inflated prices for the crap that they serve! Unfortunately, when you are hungry, you generally will eat anything so they have you "over a barrel". It's very calculated and very clever but shows no true respect for the fans who have paid a fortune merely to get through the gates! I would have liked to bring my daily chicken sandwich home for laboratory analysis to establish exactly how much of the contents were actually chicken! Happily, at this stage I am surviving and with a day to go, I think my robust constitution will get me through.

Much more to write about, not least the American golf fan, which merits pages and pages in its own right. If you are an observer of people like me, then this event is jackpot time for material. I could write a post a day for the next three months but it will be the first topic in my Ryder Cup round up tomorrow.

Good luck Team Europe today. You're going to need it!