The Ryder Cup is always exciting. Every hole makes somebody happy because one side wins and the other side loses, or else it’s a miserable tie! Next week, according to longtime PGA Tour caddie and current NBC/Golf Channel analyst Jim "Bones" MacKay, should be like excitement on steroids.
One thing that will make it frenzied from the start is that the first hole at famed Bethpage Black has been shortened by about 30 yards to allow for grandstands to be built behind the tee. That means the 397-yard hole will be closer to 360. Plenty of players will be able to reach it, and the rest will get to spitting distance from the cup.
“I just can’t imagine anything that could be more electrifying than Bryson DeChambeau starting the Ryder Cup and driving the first green at Bethpage,” MacKay said during the NBC sports conference call preview earlier this week.
Well, how about really biased announcers? Producer Tommy Roy said that NBC is taking a completely different tone with this year's telecast.
“We’ve always covered our sports events in a completely impartial way, never referring to the Americans as ‘we’,” Roy explained. “I used to have to correct Johnny Miller quite often when he’d say ‘we have to win this hole.’ And I’d get him in the headset and say, ‘Oh, Johnny, not we, the Americans.’”
That changes now. Roy is taking his cue from the telecasts of foreign countries during the Olympics.
“They are almost all very partisan,” Roy explained.
So, this time around, the announce teams are going to be absolutely biased. For instance, on Friday and Saturday morning, Terry Gannon will host while Notah Begay will be the announcer “for” the U.S., while Nick Faldo will handle commentary “for” the Europeans. They mean “for” in the sense that they are “for” one team.
In the afternoons and on Sunday, Dan Hicks will host with Brad Faxon being the “for” U.S. commentator and Paul McGinley being the “for” Europe commentator.
“I might need to adopt a referee jersey for McGinley and Fax,” Hicks said. “These guys bleed their country’s colors, especially at an event like this.”
Will it be like the Monty Python Argument Shop? Will Paul McGinley reach up and grab Brad Faxon’s tie? Will Notah Begay and Nick Faldo break out in fisticuffs?
“We’ve televised two U.S. Opens out there, so we know the course well, and we’ve experienced the energy of the Long Island crowd and what they bring to a golf event,” Roy added. “I’m expecting this to be an epic three days.”
Faxon, who is from Rhode Island and is a Red Sox fan, knows what a New York crowd is like.
“I can tell you from the crowds, playing in 2002, there’s nothing quite like a Long Island sports crowd,” he said. “Seeing the rivalry against the Yankees, I see something like that, this European team and the U.S. Team. There’s a huge rivalry.”
MacKay is hoping for a change in the Ryder Cup rules, which usually include that captains cannot consult with each other on lineups. That often means player rivalries everyone would like to see don't happen.
“I would love, if things look really close as we head into Sunday, if the two captains, Keegan Bradley and Luke Donald, who are close friends, could find 60 seconds for themselves and for the good of the game, maybe find a way to see that Rory and Scottie play each other in singles on Sunday,” he said.
Well, Bones, there is this time-honored Greek myth retold by Ovid in The Metamorphoses about Pyramus and Thisbe. They were in love, but their families would not allow them to marry. They discovered a crack in the wall between their two houses, just big enough for them to communicate. So, they did.
Maybe, borrowing this tale, someone will carry a note from one captain to the other. Maybe one will say something in a special code during a press conference that the other will understand. In Monty Python speak, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more.
If you wonder what happened to NBC’s Kevin Kisner and John Wood, the answer is that they have been tapped by the U.S. Team. Kisner is a vice-captain for the Ryder Cup. He was a captain’s assistant in the 2024 Presidents Cup and played in the 2017 and 2022 versions of that event.
Wood, who played golf for UC Berkeley, caddied for Matt Kuchar, Hunter Mahan, Mark Calcavecchia, and Kevin Sutherland. He was on Kuchar’s bag for the 2016 Rio Olympics when Kuchar won the bronze medal. He was an assistant captain for the U.S. in the 2018 Ryder Cup, has participated in six Ryder Cups as a caddie, and will now serve as this year's Team Manager.