Little League & the Ryder Cup: Why Participation Matters

The Ryder Cup has almost every advantage over its younger, less compelling brother called the Presidents Cup. There is deeper heritage. It (although at a lower prior rate) introduces American audiences to players we don't typically see here. The opponent wins sometimes, or at least ties.

A potential flaw of the Ryder Cup, though, is the ability of captains to hide players. Shy of the full roster singles matches on Sunday, the other four sessions of the matches feature only eight player from each side. In other words, a player is only truly guaranteed one match by making the squad.

Jeff Overton, you may want to talk to someone like Andrew Coltart - sat by Mark James throughout his 1999 appearance - to understand what that feels like.

The case can be made that giving captains the power to sit up to four players for all but one session demeans the Cup and the competition. After all, 17 of 24 players earned their way onto these two teams. It's like making an all-star team in Little League. Yeah, it is an honor to make the team, but it means even more to play.

At the same time, the Presidents Cup's no-hiding format allows for some real stinker matches. Put the two lousiest players together, send them out there, and hope somebody wins a point. These team matches are designed to bring us great match play golf, not fulfill some parent's desire to see their kid play for the $50 they plunked out to enroll their kid in a sport.

The right of a Ryder Cup captain to sit players can be a good thing. It is a risk - effectively fielding a smaller team at the cost of his men's stamina. The gamble can pay off, or it could fail. It makes the captain an even more real actor in the results of the matches. That said, hiding the weakest links for two of three days can be seen as the easy way out of things.

Maybe the happy medium is to force a captain to put all twelve players into play at least once during each day of the competition. Every player gets three matches guaranteed. It keeps some strategy in it for the captains - alternate shot or best ball? - while forcing them to field a full team. 

They say a team is only as powerful as its weakest link. Up until now in the Ryder Cup, that hasn't been true. But with a simple twist in the rules, it can be while maintaining an enhanced level of gamesmanship that the Presidents Cup can lack.