It’s fair to say that the Ryder Cup owes a great deal to Severiano Ballesteros, writes Ross Biddiscombe. Not only was the dashing Spaniard the heart of the team in eight matches, but he was also a winning captain and is now the inspiration of all modern European golfers. Seve was a huge reason that Team Europe came into being in 1979 – it was felt that this one man could change the course of the contests almost single-handedly. And he did.
But why did it take so long for Team Europe to form? Why was the team all-British for the first 19 matches and then GB and Ireland for another three, before the European introduction in 1979? The reasons are many, but intriguingly, there was an early 20th century golfer who was a version of Seve, an iconic continental European golfer. Could that player possibly have brought forward the formation of Team Europe by half a century?
Well, although this one European golfer would win an Open title, the sport was tiny in the early 1900s across the continent. There were around 25 golf courses in France, a handful in Germany and as few as six in the whole of Spain. Large population centres like Paris, Berlin and Madrid boasted nearby courses along with popular resorts such as Biarritz (pictured below) on the Atlantic coast of France and German spa towns like Baden-Baden, but the sport wasn’t taking off on the continent of Europe like it was in America at this time. Pros at European courses were often British and emigrating pros from Scotland or England saw more opportunity Stateside – where golf was booming among the middle classes – than they did in Europe where the sport was much more for the elites.
Biarritz Golf Club
In terms of decent golfers, the major continental European countries likely counted their numbers only in hundreds. Then chances of a golf boom across Europe were halted by World War I which started in 1914 and caused a whole generation of young sportsmen to be lost, especially in France and Germany. An expensive pastime that needed more courses to be built, equipment to be purchased, and expert teachers of the game to be imported en masse was not in anyone’s immediate post-war vision.
But there was one French player who bestrode the pre and post-war years of the early 1900s and, perhaps under different circumstances, he could have led a Seve-like charge by European golfers into the history of the Ryder Cup and established Team Europe almost 100 years ago. Nowadays, it might seem fanciful to consider a European Ryder Cup side playing in the inaugural match in 1927, but it’s worth considering this hypothetical situation in order to understand the history golf in Europe. To do that, we need to talk about Arnaud Massy (pictured below), the French golfer central to this “what if?” story.
Arnaud Massy, (Credit: Creative Commons)
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Ross Biddiscombe is the author of Ryder Cup Revealed: Tales of the Unexpected & his regular Ryder Cup posts are all on Substack; click here for the app https://substack.com/appand subscribe for FREE to receive extra Ryder Cup stories and other sporting journalism.
