GOLF EUROPEAN TOUR:IT MIGHT be a long way away, but the race for the Ryder Cup has been an underlying theme at this week's €1.5 million Madrid Masters.
First there’s the race to make Colin Montgomerie’s European team to take on the Americans at Celtic Manor in October.
But there’s also the question of the bidding for the 2018 Ryder Cup, with Madrid and Paris considered the favourites in a beauty contest that also features venues in Germany, the Netherlands and Portugal.
With 153 European Tour wins to its credit since 1972, second only to England, Spain has certainly done its bit for golf on this side of the Atlantic.
Yet the game has yet to truly take off here, and it was telling that the biggest gallery at yesterday’s pro-am was following the pony-tailed veteran Miguel Angel Jiménez and his playing partners, Jerzy Dudek and Jose María Guttierrez (aka Guti), the Real Madrid footballers.
“The Spanish players don’t know what more we can do to popularise golf at home,” lamented one of this week’s star attractions, Alvaro Quirós.
“When I won the Spanish Open earlier this year, some of the sports papers only gave it a few lines. We’re years behind other countries like Sweden, who can only play half the number of days we can here.
“We’ve got better weather and more than enough money to promote the game, but it’s misspent on all sorts of things and the only sport that matters here is football.
“We’ve been world champions many times and it doesn’t seem to matter. Even when Sergio (Garcia) went to number two in the world, nothing changed.
“Maybe the fact that golf is now an Olympic sport will improve things and we’ll get more help from the government.”
The 2018 Ryder Cup will certainly not be staged at what Graeme McDowell described as a “fiddly” but otherwise immaculate Real Sociedad Hípica Club de Campo track, just north of the capital.
But the Ulsterman won’t be complaining if he walks away with a €250,000 winner’s cheque that would edge him closer to retaining his Ryder Cup place and catapult him into the upper echelons of the world’s top-50.
Following the withdrawals of fellow Ulstermen Darren Clarke, Michael Hoey and Gareth Maybin, the Portrush star leads a seven-strong Irish challenge also featuring Shane Lowry, Peter Lawrie, Damien McGrane, Paul McGinley, Gary Murphy and Simon Thornton.
“I don’t wake up on a Monday morning, pull the rankings out and work out where I stand, but I am very much aware that I need some big weeks,” McDowell said of his Ryder Cup campaign.
“I think playing well takes care of most things and I think I am playing well enough to push on.
“For the last two-and-a-half years I’ve been between 38th and 55th in the world. That’s a long time in that window and I feel I am a better player than that.
“But it’s not easy. There are so many good players out there these days.”
Garcia is no longer a member of the world’s top-10. but he is one of 11 members of the world’s top-50 here, headed by number 11 Martin Kaymer and 13th-ranked Luke Donald.
Having blown his chance to win last week’s PGA Championship at Wentworth with a 71st-hole double bogey, Donald should prosper on a strategic track where big-hitting Quiros was able to unsheathe his driver just three times yesterday.
And seven weeks after he crashed out of the Masters looking like a broken golfer and almost a broken man, former US Open champion Michael Campbell feels ready to return to the sport.
The 41-year-old New Zealander has fallen so far that when qualifying for the British Open is held at Sunningdale on Monday week he needs 26 players to have pulled out just to get a tee-off time.
But Campbell, now 650th in the world, is not concerned whether he can make his first cut for over seven months – he just wants to start enjoying his career again.
“I have no expectations, I’m just going to play with no score in my mind at all,” he said.
“I’m not thinking about consequences or results. You have to hit the bottom before you can start climbing again, and that’s what I did at Augusta.”
