Columnist Dean Juipe: Anyone else bored by Ryder Cup?

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2002 | 9:29 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

Maybe it's just me, because I don't see any other columnists around the country who share the same sentiment.

Or maybe, for miscast patriotic reasons, people are just afraid to take this point of view in public.

But I'm bored, extremely bored, by country vs. country sporting events such as this weekend's Ryder Cup, last weekend's Solheim Cup, the recent World Basketball Championships and the never-ending Davis Cup. Granting an exception for the Olympics is the extent of my tolerance for such things.

I just don't care about competition that's centered on nationalistic issues, and I don't buy into the fanfare.

Yet news agencies saturate their audiences with an endless array of reports on these events, as if we couldn't live without them.

The Ryder Cup, for instance, is already an unavoidable nuisance for anyone who subscribes to a paper, listens to sports radio or watches TV. And when a major magazine such as Sports Illustrated donates pages upon pages to it, lesser media outlets are intimidated into following suit.

Myself, I'm reading around the Ryder Cup deluge, and, as a golf fan, am far more interested in how this weekend's Texas Open in San Antonio plays out. Yet that will only get a paragraph in the paper, at best.

Who cares if Europe or the U.S. wins the Ryder Cup? What difference could it possibly make?

It's a bunch of rich guys on a paid vacation, playing a swank course and being treated and feted as if they were royalty.

As for the pressure of representing your country in a makeshift golf tournament, it's just as likely to be politely feigned as gut-wrenching legitimate. If Tiger Woods misses a 3-footer on the final hole Sunday and the U.S. loses, he may act distraught but, in truth, it won't have even the slightest impact on his future plans or career.

Yet if he were to start missing 3-footers on the PGA Tour, the impact would be substantial.

And therein lies the crux of my complaint: Unless there's prize money at stake, the athlete's emotional investment is apt to be minimal. Sure, he wants to win and be proud to have helped his country take possession of a fancy trophy for a few months, but he's far more apt to be truly demonstrative when the putt that's hanging on the lip determines whether he'll make his mortgage payment or not.

As for last weekend's Solheim Cup (which is the women's version of the Ryder Cup), within a few days or weeks it'll be easy to forget which side won or even on what continent it was played. It has a short shelf life.

As did the men's World Basketball Championships, which came and went and only further proved that without a few dollars on the table even the best American-bred players can come across as patently indifferent. By the end of the tournament in Indianapolis, a U.S. team loaded with talent couldn't have gotten the better of a bunch of guys from Chile.

And the Davis Cup, what a joke. It's a scam of a tennis tournament, one that literally almost never ends while being treated as if it's sacrosanct.

Cups, trophies, glassware, it's all eye candy for the already rich and famous. For real pressure and suspense, it takes more than a flag to make it worth watching.

It takes cash.