The Walker Cup has never gotten the proper attention it deserves, not in recent memory at any rate. It is doubtful if that will change later this month when it is held in northeast Scotland at Royal Aberdeen, the sixth oldest golf club in the world.

Increasingly, it seems that most national newspapers in the British Isles and many in the U.S. are interested only in professional golf.

“Oh, amateurs,” is the sneer. “No Tiger Woods.” That begs the retort that many competitors in the forthcoming biennial match between Great Britain and Ireland and the U.S. are playing better than Woods, who made five double-bogeys and found 20 bunkers and water four times in his first two rounds of last month’s PGA Championship in Atlanta.

Actually, Woods did play in the Walker Cup once. It was in 1995 at Royal Porthcawl, in South Wales. Great Britain and Ireland won. And Woods lost his singles on the first day to Gary Wolstenholme, a man 15 years older than he was who was a comfortable 75 yards shorter off the tee. It was back in the days when Woods could control neither his distance nor his accuracy with short irons.

He reached the 17th with a driver and a wedge in practice (the hole measures well over 500 yards and most members can’t reach it in two shots) and then he hooked a 9-iron well out of bounds on the 18th, the ball clattering against the old wooden clubhouse. Woods may want to forget that performance. Wolstenholme, on the other hand, wants to remember it. He has dined out on it ever since.

“But it’s not professional golf, is it? It is mainly kids, isn’t it?” That’s another often-heard sneer and, while it is true that the home team have in Rhys Pugh a young man who is not 18, it is also true that the U.S. include Nathan Smith, who is 33.

“It’s too one-sided. The Americans always win.” There is no denying that. If the U.S. win again this year, and with one of the strongest teams in recent memory, they are favoured to do so, they will have won the past four Walker Cups and six of the past 10. Fortunes rise and fall, rather like the stock market. If there is concern at the dominance by the U.S. who, in all, have won 36 of the 42 contests, then what about Europe’s record in the Ryder Cup – unbeaten in eight of the past 12 Ryder Cups.

If I had to choose between stroke play and match play then I would be guided by the words of Joe Carr, among others, who said: “Stroke play is a better test of golf but match play is a better test of character.” To me, match play versus stroke play is links golf versus inland golf, red wine versus white, walking versus riding in a buggy, carrying one’s clubs versus using a trolley, the right brain to the left, wooden tees versus plastic ones.

I have knocked around the world of golf for more than 30 years, acquiring a clear idea of what I don’t like: slow play, buggies and long putters. Covering more than 120 major championships and hundreds of other events in that time has also given me an idea of which I like the most. Among these, the Walker Cup reigns supreme. It is the best event in golf.

To me the Walker Cup combines the best of all worlds. It is steeped in history. It began in 1922, before the Ryder Cup. It is a team event in an individual sport, so watching the dynamics of self-centered, idiosyncratic, egotistical men as they play for their country or continent is fascinating. Do you see grown men cry in a Walker Cup? You bet you do.

The memory of Graeme McDowell’s victory over Hunter Mahan that gave Europe a one-point victory in the Ryder Cup at Celtic Manor last autumn will live long. It was exciting but was it any more exciting than Jim Milligan’s halve with Jay Sigel in the second-day’s singles of the 1989 Walker Cup match at Peachtree when Sigel led Milligan by two holes with two to play and Milligan’s brave halve helped GB&I achieve a first victory in the U.S. in this event (and only the third overall)?

The Walker Cup is physically bigger than a Ryder Cup and the event for which it is played is just as exciting, more intimate. There are massive grandstands at a Ryder Cup; not even fairway ropes at a Walker Cup. You can hear the conversation between player and caddie as they select a club. You can hear the sound of club on ball and watch the shape of the shot as it leaves the clubface. You can’t get much nearer to the action than that.

JOHNS CREEK, GEORGIA | Decisions, decisions. Fat free skim milk or Vitamin D milk? Decaffeinated or regular coffee? Raspberry or strawberry yogurt? Then on two steamy days in Georgia, who to watch: Luke Donald or Tiger Woods?

Thousands went for Woods, the world No. 30; hundreds for Donald, the world No. 1. Thousands were wrong, the hundreds were right. Who wants to see a man play 13 holes in 10-over par, and run up five double-bogeys before his inevitable departure from the tournament on Friday night, when you can watch a man play with the skill of a surgeon and the stealth of a cat burglar? Included in Donald’s display was a bunker shot on the swooping 12th of such deftness and skill that it was Woodsian in thought and Ballesteros-like in execution.

Look at Donald and you see a man of medium height, slim, with an open face topped by curly hair, a man who has a jaunty walk, a quiet voice and a swing that is built on a rhythm that repeats as regularly and smoothly as a Swiss watch. Watch him from a distance and you can’t tell which is his practice swing and which the real thing. Have you ever seen Donald not finish on balance, hands raised high? He is the same with a wedge in his hands as he is with a driver.

Donald is pin-neat with his irons, a man who aims at a flagstick and rarely finishes far from his target. But when his driver is in his hands there is a surprising wildness. This was obvious again last week when, often, a drive that went right was followed by one that went left and contributed to the two double-bogeys he had in his first 36 holes.

“My legs get over active and that causes my right hip to get too high at impact and the result of that is I hit it high right or left left,” he explained.

Donald looks, walks, talks and plays with quiet assurance. He doesn’t strut as Woods sometimes did. He doesn’t march as Jack Nicklaus did. Everything Donald does is done with the minimum sound and maximum efficiency. He’d be a wonderful cat burglar. Martin Kaymer was clearly unsettled when he became world No. 1 but Donald wears that title as comfortably as if it were a Savile Row jacket.

Talking of jackets, Donald has a considerable wardrobe thanks to a sponsorship deal with Ralph Lauren. When he checked into a hotel during a tournament he allowed Diane, his wife, only one hanger until she complained. She is now allowed two hangers.

It is easy to see why Donald, 33, has become the success he has. “If you have the game of Luke Donald there is no point in trying to become Tiger Woods,” Thomas Levet, Donald’s teammate in the 2004 Ryder Cup team, said. “Luke has realised where his strengths are and he sticks to them. That is very, very intelligent.”

Intelligence is one reason why Donald is such a good golfer. A rare character combination is another. “Luke has the ability to use both sides of the brain,” Jim Fannin, the performance coach, said. “He is highly creative but there is a discipline about him that most creative people do not have.”

Donald outscored Woods last week but could not escape him on the golf course. On the difficult, downhill 15th, a roar from the Woods group caught Donald on the backswing on Thursday. On Friday, it was sudden applause for a rare Woods birdie on the 15th that wafted up the hill to the 16th green where Donald had to step back from a putt.

Donald had the last word, though. Woods’ erratic play caused him to miss the halfway cut for only the fourth time in a major championship. Donald, meanwhile, wiped his brow and reminded his watchers of how it was that he has won three tournaments and had eight top-10 finishes in the 16 tournaments he has competed in this year.

Ask other players about Donald and the thing they all mention, what they covet most, is his short game. “From 100 yards in he’s the best in the world,” Paul Casey said. It was ironic then that this is what let him down at the end of his third round when he had a chance to join the leaders on 5-under par and dropped three strokes in his last three holes. Thus did a 65, 5 under, became a 68.

Donald didn’t look like the best player in the world when he played his third shot to the 18th, a 9 iron that needed to travel 143 yards to clear the water and actually carried 140.

“I am angry with myself,” Donald said, though from the tone of his voice you would not have known that. “That finish leaves a sour taste in the mouth. I had something really good going and I threw it away. I think I shall go and punish myself in the gym.”

SURREY, ENGLAND | Not the least intriguing thing about Tom Watson is that while he is a great and proud American he is at the same time as British as can be. He is a Yank who is an Anglophile. There is a special warmth in the voices of British spectators when they shout “come on Tom!” as they have done for the past two weeks either in the Open at Sandwich or the Senior Open at Walton Heath.

Not many Americans seem so at home in this country and are so curious to learn its rhythms and rituals, so tolerant of what other Americans regard as Britain’s vicissitudes. Without a hint of a frown passing over his freckled face, Watson copes with driving on the left hand side of the road, does not mind queueing, eats fish and chips and in the days when he drank beer did not mind a pint or two of the best bitter.

Watson has spent at least nine months of his life in Britain between his 34 Opens, Senior Opens or just coming over for fun golf.

“The attraction is the love of the game everybody has here,” Watson said during the Senior Open. “You see people out today and they’re following in the rain and (at Sandwich) last week it was the people who made the stands chock a block full when it was raining and blowing 25 mph and raining sideways. That’s why I like it over here.

“This country still has a marvellous flavour to it. It’s different to the country in which I live. The politics are different. Sport is different. It’s football and cricket and golf here. The education is different here. It is all to the good. I love the kids here because they are so polite and they ask you for things in the right way.”

Watson even has a workmanlike grasp of cricket, which is rare among Americans. “I know that they hit the ball,” Watson said. “I know how they score. There are six pitches to an over. I know how they get out. I know how the batters are put out. It has a little to do with American baseball as far as spinning and making the ball move. They make the ball move off the ground rather than through the air, which is different. But that’s about it. I don’t really understand cricket.”

Then there’s his surname, Watson. Tom Watson bears the surname of one of the great characters in British crime literature. Dr Watson was the amanuensis of Sherlock Holmes, the great British detective.

Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. Conan Doyle maintained a locker at the New Zealand golf club near Woking and the locker still bears his name though as he is dead it has a line drawn through it. One of Holmes’ catch phrases, which he uses when Watson seems a little dim in understanding something, is: “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

At times at Sandwich and at Walton Heath Watson made golf look elementary. That’s his secret. An uncomplicated swing, a rhythm that shows no sign of disappearing, and a curious and shrewd brain. Watson’s length has shriveled now as he approaches his 62nd birthday, but course management enables him to cope with men half his age who can blast their drives 50 yards past his. When he holed in one on the sixth in the first round at Sandwich, he used a 4-iron; Tom Lewis, his amateur partner and a young man one third as old as he, used a 6-iron.

Because Watson is so intelligent and such a good role model, he is paired with promising young men in the Open. He likes to see the sparkle in their eyes and their enthusiasm and to assess how good they are. “They remind me of me at that age,” he said. He should know, after all. He has won the Open five times and finished second in 2009 and 22nd this year. These promising young men relish the chance to learn from one of the greatest in the game, to see him magic his golf ball around difficult courses, sometimes in foul conditions and to observe how he never seems to stop thinking and often eschews the obvious in favour of the unusual.

At Turnberry in 2009, when Watson was 59, it was Matteo Manassero, the Italian prodigy who was then only 16. At Sandwich when Watson was 61, it was Tom Lewis, who is 20. It is not entirely coincidental that when paired with Watson both Manassero and Lewis went on to win the silver medal as the leading amateur.

It is hard to imagine a time when Watson will not visit Britain annually and light up golf on these shores. He is as much a part of golf in these islands as foursomes and kummel, plus-fours and Labradors. Long may it continue. Long may Watson make it all seem so elementary.

SANDWICH, ENGLAND | I grew up in a house adjoining a golf course on one of the last hills in the glorious Cotswolds. The course was a wide open one with blessedly few trees. It was not near the sea. After only a few visits to seaside courses I developed a love for links golf that has not diminished since. In fact, it has increased. To me links golf is not just golf; it’s pure golf. It’s red wine to white wine, Ying to Yang, opera to ballet. It’s the way the game began, golf at its most natural, golf at its most enjoyable.

The feel of springy turf underfoot, a whiff of salt coming off the sea, a seagull squawking 100 feet above, a gentle breeze stirring the various grasses that grow so profusely in the rich soil. All these were present at Sandwich last week and never more so than on Friday, a day when, to quote P.G. Wodehouse, “the entire world shouted fore!”

Best of all was the sight of Darren Clarke bowling along the fairways of Royal St George’s, even better the sight of Clarke winning the major championship of his dreams, the Open. Clarke doesn’t so much walk as bustle, like a man chasing his hat that has just been blown off his head. His back is straight, he often has a smile on his face, and he might be cupping a cigarette in the palm of his hand, wanting the benefit of a drag upon it to calm his nerves yet aware that to be seen smoking in public is not a desirable image.

Clarke plays very good golf on inland courses as he demonstrated at the 2006 Ryder Cup at the K Club near Dublin where he won his three matches. But when I picture him in my mind’s eye, him it is on a links. To me he is the quintessential links golfer, taking a wide stance and using those powerful shoulders of his to pick his ball off the turf without disturbing a blade of grass and sending it low and powerfully towards its target.

His swing is a bit of a roundhouse swing, shorter than Dustin Johnson’s and Miguel Angel Jimenez’s, but there is no wasted movement in it and no loss of energy. It’s the purposeful swing of a man who played a lot of golf when the wind was doing its best to blow him off his feet.

“We have a lot of links courses in Ireland,” Clarke said. “Some of the best in the world, in fact. And I grew up on them. It’s what I do. I love links courses.” And how that showed in that round on Friday, a 68 that took him to 4-under par and a share of the lead that he never relinquished. Watch Clarke on such a day and you admire the speed at which he plays and his friendly demeanour and the sight of him cracking a joke with his playing partners as they wait on a tee. Most of all, you admire his shot-making.

Clarke gave another demonstration of it on this Friday, hitting a cut 7-iron and taking a daring line over the right hand greenside bunker on the 18th, coaxing in a 55-foot putt for an eagle on the seventh, hitting a 60-yard pitch into the 16th green that didn’t rise much above head height, bravely attacking the flagstick on the eighth when peril was all around. This was some golf.

He played rugby and golf as a boy. “He was a good number 8, if a bit slow,” Godfrey Clarke, his father, said. “But he would always let you know he was there.” So he concentrated on his golf and was taken to be given the once over by John Garner, the former Europe Ryder Cup player. Garner took one look at the cheery-faced boy and his swing and said, “Don’t change a thing. You keep going, son.”

And Clarke has done just that ever since, enhancing the game with his skill, making friends wherever he goes and burning the candle at both ends. He has had his sadness, notably when Heather, his wife, died of cancer in 2006 but now he is engaged to be married again, to a former Miss Northern Ireland. He has sold his home in Berkshire, England and returned to live with his two sons in Northern Ireland. Having found renewed personal happiness, he is, at 42, playing some of the best golf of his life.

After Clarke had won the NEC Bridgestone Invitational, a World Golf Championship event, I wrote: “Darren Clarke likes the inside of a Ferrari, the outside of a Cuban cigar and the bottom of a glass of Guinness.” That was in 2003 and there is no reason to alter that assessment now. He remains a wonderful player of links courses and a man’s man.

BETHESDA, MARYLAND l Graeme McDowell delivered. My goodness, how he delivered. The 2010 U.S. Open champion, the man who triumphed at Pebble Beach, fulfilled every function the United States Golf Association required of him and earned paeans of praise from Mike Davis, the executive director.

In his year as champion, McDowell had spoken into hundreds of microphones, seen journalists scribble thousands of his words into their notebooks. There had been enough television footage of him to plaster over the whole of Ulster from east to west. How many times had he talked of the significance of becoming the first man from Europe to win the Open for 40 years?

How often had interviewers interrogated his father, his sister, his brother, his managers, his clubmates, trying to capture the significance for Northern Ireland of having the U.S. Open champion as a countryman. How many requests for a few minutes of his time had his manager received?

But now, on the eighth hole of his second round at Congressional – his 17th – the defending champion experienced the kind of luck that told him it was about to end. This was the hole Rory McIlroy, his friend and countryman, had eagled a few hours earlier. At 350 yards, it was the only par 4 that was less than 400 yards long and, if you dared, to drive over the trees – to cut the corner in other words – you could get very close to the green.

McDowell, holding his head high, strode eagerly to his ball. He’d had two birdies in his previous nine holes. He was 1-over par, and while this was 13 strokes behind McIlroy, it was six or so strokes behind Y.E. Yang, who was McIlroy’s leading chaser. A birdie here and a par 5 that he might birdie coming up next and McDowell was thinking: “I can get under par.”

“Rory’s a flusher,” McDowell said. “He’s probably the best driver of a ball I have ever seen. At the Ryder Cup we nicknamed him the BMW because he is the ultimate driving machine.”

McIlroy’s drive on the eighth had left him 113 yards; McDowell’s second shot was further, a flick with a wedge. But whereas McIlroy’s ball rolled slowly back down a slight incline and eventually dropped into the hole, McDowell’s came down the same hill, past the hole and on and on and on.

“Stop,” Colin Morrissey, one of McDowell’s managers, muttered to himself as he watched. “Stop,” Kenny McDowell, Graeme’s father, said, peering at the ball from underneath a large straw hat and behind the ropes.

Disobediently, the ball ended 30 feet below the hole. No chance for a birdie; a par was disappointing.

So, too, was the bogey six on the ninth, his 18th, to close out his round. Going for the green, McDowell’s second shot hit a tree and his approach left him 35 feet from the flagstick over a ridge, a slightly downhill putt. Three putts followed.

Those were the few moments when the 31-year-old Northern Irishman knew in his heart of hearts that he would not be holding up the handsome silver trophy he’d had boxed up and posted back to the USGA a couple of weeks earlier. He wasn’t going to defend his title as Curtis Strange had in 1989 after winning at The Country Club, Brookline, the year before, nor as Willie Anderson had done at the wonderfully named Myopia Hunt Club in 1905, after winning in 1904 and 1903.

“I’m proud of the way I handled myself this past year” McDowell said. And well he might. In the aftermath of his success in California, he had won a tournament in Spain, scored the point in the singles that won Europe the Ryder Cup and defeated Tiger Woods in Woods’ own tournament.

“Phew, he might have thought to himself as he relaxed at his home in Orlando at year’s end. “What a year.”

Even after crashing out of the lead he had held after 54 holes at The Players in May with a last round 79, and even after an 81 in the third round of the Wales Open in June, McDowell retained his dignity. He treated success and failure, Kipling’s twin imposters, with equal amounts of respect and disdain, remaining calm, courteous and articulate. If, as someone said, you tell more about a person in defeat than in victory then you can say after his year of years that McDowell has proved himself a rounded, thoroughly admirable young man.

“You just couldn’t ask for a better U.S. Open champion than Graeme McDowell,” said Davis at Congressional. “He has been a wonderful, gracious champion and has done a terrific job representing the championship and the game.”

Tim Finchem, perhaps the most powerful man in golf, has spoken words of praise about Wales and her staging of last year’s Ryder Cup.

“I thought it was fantastic,” Finchem said. “The last day was probably as good as any I have seen anywhere. It was great competition.

“I thought the galleries were the best I have ever witnessed in the world,” Finchem continued in an exclusive interview with Global Golf Post in his office at Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. “One, they were big. That is always nice. Two, they were very knowledgeable. Three, they were partial to the European team but were considerate to the American team and applauded good shotmaking by the American team.”

Words such as these will come as a surprise to the inhabitants of the country that staged the rain-spattered, elongated but ultimately enthralling Ryder Cup last autumn. In their eyes, Finchem is the man who was responsible for the Ryder Cup being so weather-disrupted and an event that, despite concluding with an exceptional last-day’s play, was, overall, not so beneficial for Wales as had been hoped.

Finchem’s words were not spoken to ingratiate himself with the Welsh but they will do a huge amount to make the Welsh adjust their views of him. Up to now, for reasons that are understandable but wrong, he had been a figure of dislike. A saying in Wales goes something like this: “Tim Finchem’s mae ei enw fe’n faw yng Nghymru,” which means “Tim Finchem’s name is mud.”

What has the commissioner done to deserve such harsh words? The Welsh thought he singlehandedly spoiled the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to showcase their country around the world.

When Wales won the right to host the 2010 Ryder Cup at the Celtic Manor Resort, it achieved a huge marketing tool. For nine years the country could promote itself as the venue of the third most important sporting event in the world. Wales could boast of its dragons and its castles, of the Celtic myths enshrined in the Mabinogion, its history at keeping out the barbaric English.

It could cite its success in attracting inward investment, as well as its culinary customs of growing and eating leeks (the national vegetable) of putting an egg on top of a toasted slice of bread covered in cheese and calling it Welsh Rarebit. In those nine years leading up to and including the event , Wales could do as much as it liked to promote itself as a golfing destination and bring in extra revenue and tourism.

If the figures that are bandied about after recent Ryder Cups are to be believed, then staging one brings in nearly $100 million to the host venue. It also brings in tourists, money and, well, more money.

But what happened last October? It rained heavily on the first weekend and Wales’ worst fears about the date were realised. For days, the Usk valley was shrouded in a mist that seemed to dampen the spirits of the Welsh, who can tend towards gloominess at the best of times.

At Celtic Manor last autumn, there were not very many television pictures of castles overlooking sandy beaches or views of verdant valleys. Instead, there were photos of mud and rain, of a golf course over which there was no play for nearly eight hours on the first day. Spectators sloshed through the mud and sheltered from the rain and all the time muttering “ Tim Finchem’s name is mud.”

Their reasoning: If he hadn’t invented the FedEx Cup and thus commandeered four weeks in August and September, then the Ryder Cup could have been held earlier in the year and the chances of it being hit by bad weather would have been diminished.

To those who said this, it didn’t matter that it wasn’t solely Finchem’s fault. The PGA of America, which stages the Ryder Cup in the U.S., had also agreed to moving the date back. So had the European Tour and the PGA on this side of the Atlantic. Yet the name that was on everybody’s lips in Wales was that of Finchem.

So to hear, seven months later, what Finchem had to say about the Ryder Cup was particularly interesting.

“The whole thing was quite a showcase for Wales,” Finchem said. “I don’t know how many people realise the impact Wales has on the arts. The concert (in the Millennium Stadium on Tuesday night) was very moving, and as I sat there I was thinking: If you are going to use a big event platform to tell a story, then this is how you do it. From Katharine Jenkins to the videos, it was a very well done week and I was fortunate to be a part of it.”

There is another verbal mannerism you hear a lot in Wales.
People end their conversations by saying, “so there you are.”

Let’s use that phraseology now. “So there you are, Mr. Finchem. Your name is not mud any longer. Diolch en vowr for those kind words.” (Thank you for those kind words.) We forgive you.”

NEWPORT, WALES | The high point of the biggest week in Wales’s history came in Cardiff, the capital, soon after 9 p.m. last Wednesday evening. The Europe and U.S. teams had eaten dinner in the nearby castle, the earliest parts of which date back a cool 1000 years or so, and then moved across the road to the Millennium Stadium, an icon for modern Wales. There, the host country’s own Catherine Zeta Jones, wife of Michael Douglas and thus one half of, arguably, the most powerful couple in Hollywood, was followed on to the stage by the Prince of Wales. The future King of England twiddled with his bow tie before speaking a few sentences in Welsh, a few more in English and making his Royal exit.

After a start like that the gala dinner for the Ryder Cup, at which both teams and their partners were introduced on stage to an audience of 10,000, was likely to be special. It turned out to be exceptional. “I’ve seen 18 of these,” Ken Schofield, formerly the executive director of the European Tour, said. “That was the best.”

Sadly, the pride of Wednesday was followed by the embarrassment of Friday. On Thursday night and the following morning one third of a month’s rainfall fell in 12 hours – and it didn’t stop falling. Remarkably, organisers got all four four-ball matches onto the course for the first session’s play of the Ryder Cup but two hours later they were brought in and it was another seven hours before play recommenced.

Wales has grown in self-confidence in recent years, boosted by the arrival of the Welsh Assembly, a local Parliament, the erection of the Millennium Centre and by winning the Ryder Cup bid, which was expected to generate £70 million for the local economy and to showcase Wales to 700 million television viewers in more than 100 countries. Wales, a country the size of Massachusetts or Israel with a population of 2.9 million, was confident that despite being smaller in size and in number of inhabitants than England, Scotland, Spain and Ireland, previous hosts on this side of the Atlantic, it would stage an outstanding Ryder Cup.

There is a warmness about the Welsh people. They are very hospitable, wanting to welcome visitors to their country, keen for an excuse to celebrate. “I likes a party, I does,” is a saying heard quite often in Wales. The Ryder Cup gave them the opportunity for one. Just as the Irish are known for their “craic” so the Welsh are known for their “hwyl.”

The sadness for them on that wet Friday was the fear that their first Ryder Cup would be remembered as the rain-sodden Ryder Cup. There was a pop song a few years ago called “Lost in France.” Gloomy Celts, and there are many of those, worried that the biennial event would become known as “Waterlogged in Wales” or “Wet in Wales.”

What went wrong, what cast a dampener on the Ryder Cup was the realisation that the PGA Tour in the U.S., the PGA of America and the European Tour had all contrived to allow the event to be held at a time of year when bad weather was more likely than good. It was originally scheduled for a date two weeks earlier.

“These atrocious conditions could have been avoided,” Tony Jacklin, the former Open champion and captain of Europe in the 1983, 1985, 1987 and 1989 matches, said. “They are a direct result of the decision to push the Ryder Cup back into the first week of October to accommodate the FedEx Cup.”

A friend, whose identity would be startling were it revealed, e-mailed me on Friday night. “This was a balloon waiting to meet a pin. When money determines the choice of venue, combined with the postponement of dates in order to satisfy Comm. Finchem’s FedEx “play-offs” playing in Wales on an inland course was an insane pushing of luck. How very, very sad.”

The feeling in Wales last week was one of sympathy for Sir Terry Matthews, the Welsh-born billionaire who put so much money into building Celtic Manor as a showcase for the third biggest sporting event in the world, as well as for Wales itself and then found that weather that might have been avoided was not.

The exact dates for the 2014 Ryder Cup at Gleneagles have not yet been settled. They must be moved forward for the match to have a better chance of more daylight each day and decent weather overall. It is arrogant, greedy and improper of the authorities to fail to do this. Wales deserved better. Samuel Ryder, the founder of what has become a magnificent competition, deserved better. Sir Terry Matthews deserved better. The players, pawns in the proceedings, deserved better. In Wales, they got what they didn’t deserve.

ALMATY, KAZAKHSTAN | Here in Almaty at the foot of the Tien Shan mountains in Kazakhstan, it is pleasantly hot. The September sunshine bears no resemblance to the searing heat of midsummer when it can reach 100 degrees fahrenheit but it is still a gentle 75. On these days in late summer, black, crow-like birds have arrived on the golf courses and soon their beaks are busy unearthing insects and worms.

The Kazakhstan Open conjures up images of Mongol hordes thundering down from the hills on scrawny horses, their robes flowing in the breeze, knives in their teeth and plundering travellers on the Silk Route. Not quite the Waste Management Phoenix Open, is it? 

“This is Genghis Khan country” says Jamie Hodges, of Parallel Media, the event’s promoter, looking out from the marbled splendour of the terrace of the Zhailjau golf club where the Open is taking place over a golf course designed by Arnold Palmer. 

Kazakhstan, one of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics until 1991 and independent since then, is the largest landlocked nation and the ninth-largest country in the world. Inhabited by only 15.5 million people, it is also one of the least populated. 

But what it hasn’t got in inhabitants, it has in minerals. It is said that Kazakhstan has some of almost every mineral in the world, as well as huge resources of gas, oil and petrol, which give it huge economic clout. It is striving to become one of the world’s most developed countries in the next 20 years and expects to have a gross domestic product 30-percent higher next year than this.

As this happens, Kazakhs have abandoned their traditional sports for more contemporary ones. Its rugby team has reached the play-offs for next year’s rugby World Cup final in New Zealand, and though the Kazakhstan Open only started in 2005, the country’s wealth made it the largest purse of that year and ever since on the European Challenge Tour. 

The Challenge Tour is a multi-cultural journey around Europe, mainly, but not always, by airplane. Participants speak different languages, come from varied cultural backgrounds and are united in their love of golf. In this year’s Kazakhstan Open, for example, 19 different countries were represented. Travel on a players’ coach to or from a tournament and you can hear four, five or six different languages being spoken simultaneously.

The growth of golf in a country that is five-times the size of Texas started at Nurtau golf club 16 years ago. It is now played at five 18-hole clubs and one nine-hole club. Kazakhstan expects to stage a European Tour event in 2012 on a course designed by Colin Montgomerie. 

Alain de Soultrait, the boss of the Challenge Tour, remembers the first time he visited the country to discuss the possibility of staging a tournament. 

“I met the president, who was playing golf with a few cronies. The shafts of his golf clubs were coated with gold and he used a driver that had a diamond in the face. Perhaps 20 people knew about golf then. I find Kazakhstan is fascinating. The environment is exceptional. The moment I stepped off the plane and saw the Tien Shan mountains, I was struck by how powerful they were. They are the foothills of the Himalayas. The culture is fascinating. The people are remarkable. They are everything but stupid. “

Konstantin Lifanov, a golf professional and general secretary of the Kazakhstan Golf Federation, occasionally has to play with the president. 

“He started golf in Kazakhstan” Lifanov said. “He picked it up in Singapore where he met some Japanese and decided to bring it home. The Open is good for us. We can introduce Kazakhstan as a tourist venue through the medium of golf. If 132 players come to play in Almaty that means we have 132 ambassadors flying around the world and telling another 132 players about golf in Kazakhstan. They say that Kazakhstan is a good place, good with tourists and that the golf is good. That can’t be bad, can it?”

Nurtau, the oldest golf course in the country, was used for the Open in the early days and players and officials stayed in a large white sanatorium at the end of the course where a fierce-looking babushka guarded each floor.  

Now everyone is accommodated at the Hyatt Regency in a wide street in Almaty, where the hotel bookshop stocks dozens of Penguin Popular Classics, paperback books by Dickens and Shakespeare. Now, large, racy cars roar down the streets along which Leon Trotsky walked in 1928, having been exiled from Moscow. And now the apple orchards that once made Almaty famous are disappearing.

Not that Alvaro Velasco minded particularly. The Spaniard won the 2010 Kazakhstan Open with a 72-hole total of 21-under par, one stroke better than the winning total of Edoardo Molinari last year. As well as the trophy, Velasco collected a cheque for €64,000. In Almaty, which means the “Father of the Apple,” Velasco had pulled out an enormous plum. 

A lifetime spent watching and playing golf has yielded some all-time favourite places from which to watch the game: nestled down in the springy grass on the tall dune by the left hand side of the 12th at Royal Birkdale; standing on the balcony outside the office of the chief executive of the R&A with the 1st tee of the Old course below and Old Tom Morris’s green to the left; high on the headland at Pebble Beach with the 6th green in front of you, the 7th tee nearby, the 7th green and 8th tee below; in the shade of the spreading oak tree on the lawn at Augusta National.

To these now must be added some new favourites. Not one but two from Whistling Straits, a man-made creation that looks unmanmade. The first is a point on the outward nine holes just between the 3rd and the 7th holes. In this heavenly spot last Thursday there was a moment when the sky was Cambridge blue and Lake Michigan ebbed and flowed half-heartedly and its colours near the shoreline were vibrant enough to suggest it was the Caribbean. To the right was the drop dead gorgeous 3rd hole, 180 yards or so. To the left the drop dead gorgeous 7th, another par 3, this time of 220 or so yards. 

These glorious holes that hug the shore of Lake Michigan on the front nine would be more than enough for most courses. Most courses do not have one such hole, nor such a view, but at Whistling Straits they are not even the half of it. There is a similar viewing position on the homeward nine that offers as much as the one on the front nine. Get out there! Don’t give up if you turn your foot in a rabbit scrape or slip on the grass. It will be worth it when you arrive. In time and after much huffing and puffing you come to another of these remarkable conjunctions of holes that make this course so distinctive. To your right as you face the water will be the 16th, at 570 yards the shortest of the par 5s and known as Endless Bite while to your left is that most neglected of holes, the orphan child of modern golf course architecture, the short par 3. The 12th , 140 yards or so, is known as Pop Up.

Almost wherever you look at Whistling Straits you see row upon row of towering sand dunes. Many are higher than the one on the 6th at Royal St. George’s, the hole known as The Maiden on the course that is called Royal St. Mark’s in Ian Fleming’s book Goldfinger. Most of the dunes at Whistling Straits make the Himalayas at Prestwick seem like a foothill. In a contest as to which is the more visual, Whistling Straits outplays the old inward nine holes at Nefyn in north Wales, which is saying something. It is more scenic than the Old Head in Ireland, which takes some doing and frankly it knocks Pebble Beach into a cocked hat. Topographically and visually it is stunning.

Yet Whistling Straits is a bastard golf course. Note I did not say of a golf course. That would be pejorative though I dare say Anthony Kim was harbouring dark thoughts after taking a 7 on the 16th in the first round, Robert McClellan an 8 on the 1st on Thursday and Henrik Stenson and Freddie Jacobsen who both had 8s on the second hole, Jacobsen in the second round and Stenson in the first.

It is a bastard in the sense that it is neither one thing nor the other. It is a faux links, one that looks for all the world like a combination of Ballybunion, Pebble Beach, Kingsbarns, Royal St. George’s and Sand Hills yet plays like the heavily irrigated courses of Medinah, Valhalla, Atlanta Athletic Club, Southern Hills and Oak Hill. “What’s interesting about Whistling Straits for me is that it’s a Scottish-looking course that plays like an American course,” Phil Mickelson said. “It takes a little getting used to, the fact that you see the fescues and the sand, the dunes and the pot bunkers and you want to run balls up to the hole. But…it’s too soft. The ball stops and you have to fly balls on to the green.”

Sunday at Whistling Straits was God-given. Clear sky, temperatures in the 80s, low humidity and a westerly wind gusting at up to 25mph wind that set the flags dancing, “a morning when all nature shouted fore” as P.G. Wodehouse might have put it. It was a day that more than made up for the fog and leaden-skies that had hung over the course in the preceding days. This magnificent day served as a reminder that Whistling Straits is the most visually stunning golf course in the northern hemisphere , and one of the most in the world, but a bastard golf course nonetheless.

When Colin Montgomerie, the Europe captain, introduced Thomas Bjorn, Darren Clarke and Paul McGinley as his vice-captains for the forthcoming Ryder Cup, there was good humour in the air at Wentworth. With Darren Clarke around it is rarely any different. “If I am in charge of the keg of Guinness, that will be fine,” Clarke said, beaming and full of bonhomie.

Much was made later of the disagreements that had marked Montgomerie’s past relationships with Clarke and Bjorn. Clarke, for example, was critical of Montgomerie for his alleged cheating at a tournament in Indonesia a few years ago while Bjorn, who had railed against Ian Woosnam for not picking him for the 2006 match, accused Montgomerie “of behaving like a three-year-old” after being disturbed by him while competing in a tournament in Bangkok in 2004.

Children! Children! Should anyone be surprised that when 156 men roam the world playing against one another week in and week out with large prize money at stake, there are going to be instances such as Bjorn’s. The thing to do here is to applaud Clarke and Bjorn for putting Europe’s cause ahead of past rivalries. Helping Europe regain the Ryder Cup, and with it the money that is so important to the future of the European Tour, is really, really important. The subtext to all this is: The event’s the thing.

Nonetheless, the thought occurs: has Montgomerie missed a trick? Though three vice-captains are more than any team from this side of the Atlantic has ever had, (and the same number as Paul Azinger had in Kentucky in 2008), why not have four, one for each match on the first two days? It is possible to have too many vice-captains, though it has not happened yet. It is much more likely that a captain has too few, as Nick Faldo had two years ago.

One of the charges leveled at Faldo after Europe’s defeat was that he tried to do too much himself. “The SAS operate in small units,” Faldo said at the time. “They’re like a two-man army. That’s what I like.” He had only Jose Maria Olazabal to help him. Can you wonder that Faldo made a number of questionable decisions when he was trying to do so much himself? His public speeches were rambling and too filled with references to his family. He got embroiled in a silly spat with the European press about his pairings in practice. That said, no captain should have to endure a loss of form by three of his star players as Faldo did with Harrington, Garcia and Westwood. They delivered only 2 ½ points out of a possible 11, not the 5 or so he had every right to expect from them. Ian Poulter won four points.

At Valhalla and in the build-up to it, Paul Azinger taught future Ryder Cup teams several things it would be well to have observed. He taught how to whip up patriotism – rallies downtown and regular calls for the 13th man. He taught his men the importance of the acronym WIN – What’s Important Now. He was brilliant at making sure his players felt comfortable. “Paul has a great EQ – explanation quotient,” said Ron Braund, Azinger’s life coach who accompanied Azinger everywhere. “He believes that the “I win, you lose” approach is no good. Paul is an “I win, you win man.”

Most impressive of all was Azinger’s tactic of dividing the team into groups of players and putting one vice-captain in charge of each group, or pod as he called them. Each vice-captain had only one thing to do that week – keep his men happy and liase with his captain. “I didn’t see Antony Kim hit a practice shot until Thursday” Azinger said. “I relied on Ray Floyd.” It worked brilliantly and surely laid down a template for future captains – on both sides of the Atlantic.

Earlier this year I had two delightful, free-ranging conversations with Paul Goydos, the personable American who is one of Pavin’s four vice-captains in Wales in October. “You know what,” Goydos said suddenly in the midst of one of these conversations. “Corey should let me deal with the press. That’ll free him up for other things. If I screw up, which I almost certainly will, then it doesn’t matter. If Corey screws up, then that’s a different matter. It’ll become an issue in itself that he will have to spend time sorting out and that is time he has not got.”

You know what the most sought-after commodity is at a Ryder Cup? Time. If the modern Ryder Cup has taught us anything it is how much there is to do and how little time in which to do it. It is a 14-hour day for the first few days and even longer once competitive play starts.

Montgomerie will not have enough time in the hectic days starting on Monday 27 September when he arrives at Celtic Manor. For that matter, nor will Pavin. Will Montgomerie be able to make up for what looks at this point like an early error?