The Ryder Cup, like the Masters, brings golf to millions of people who only follow it casually, if that. The beauty of that is it gives golf a chance to spreads its wings, and explain its peculiar ways. Anybody watching two beefy European players, Jon Rahm of Spain and Tyrrell Hatton of England, on the 7th hole in the opening session of Friday’s alternate-shot play got a crash course in how the whole thing works.
Every time a golf ball moves, at all, the rules require some kind of accounting of it, either by stroke, penalty or verbal explanation. That’s the most fundamental part of the game.
On the 7th hole, Rahm hit his team’s tee shot wide and right. Hatton was playing the second shot from literal rough ground — bare dirt, under trees, a stick thicker than a stogie about a half inch from their ball. With a camera staring at the ball’s dimples, Hatton and Rahm, 440 pounds of golfing muscle, squatted over the ball like kids at a beach looking at an exotic star fish. They didn’t dare poke at any of the nearby twigs for fear of starting a Ryder Cup version, and to keep the kiddie theme going, tiddlywinks. Now you’re playing Operation, the three-and-over game where the aim is to extract bones from your patient without getting electrocuted.
Big, big men. A fine, delicate procedure. Hatton was startled at one point, when he nearly set off a firework by stepping on a twig.
The stakes were so high Rahm and Hatton decided to abort their game of move-the-stick. It really seemed, at that moment, that the nearby stick would compromise Hatton’s swing with an iron.
