A SEED MERCHANT WITH A GOLDEN IDEA

Although I haven’t been to a Ryder Cup I have actually held the Trophy. I was lucky enough that Samuel Ryder’s home course was 800 yds from my house growing up. He took up golf late, in his fifties and fell in love with the great game immediately. In 1926 he watched an informal match between British and American professionals at Wentworth and felt something stir. He commissioned a gold trophy, pledged to fund the contest, and insisted that the players who competed must be professionals, not amateurs playing for fun. This was an event for men for whom this was their livelihood and their craft.

What Ryder understood instinctively was that the context, playing for your country, playing alongside teammates, not merely for a cheque, transformed the meaning of every shot. It was not a new game. It was the same game, made newly serious.

“I feel as though I have created something that will last for ever.”
— Samuel Ryder, after the first match, 1927

SEVE CHANGED EVERYTHING

The early editions of the Ryder Cup saw Team GB take on America on their own. For five decades the Ryder Cup was a largely ceremonial exercise in American dominance. Great Britain could not compete with the depth, the conditioning, the culture of professional golf that had taken root in the United States. The matches were polite, well-attended, and almost entirely predictable.

Enter stage left Severiano Ballesteros. When the competition was opened to a full European team in 1979, Seve arrived not merely as a golfer but as a force. He glared at opponents. He stalked fairways like he owned them. He made birdies that had no business existing and then stared down the leaderboard as if daring it to disagree. Under captain Tony Jacklin, who demanded first class travel, first class hotels and first class respect for his players. At the Belfry in 1985 Europe claimed their first victory in 28 years and Seve would go on to spearhead many more victories for team Europe.

DEFINING MOMENT · MUIRFIELD VILLAGE, 1987

EUROPEAN WIN ON AMERICAN SOIL

Europe arrived in Ohio as outsiders. They left as champions, winning 15–13 in a match that sent shockwaves through American golf. Seve and José María Olázábal — arguably the greatest foursomes partnership the event has ever seen — won their matches with a telepathic chemistry built on mutual trust and shared pride. The US could not replicate it because they could not manufacture what those two players had between them.

THE WAR ON THE SHORE — AND WHY SPORT NEEDS VILLAINS

Brookline, Massachusetts. Europe led 10–6 going into Sunday singles. It was, by any reasonable analysis, over. What followed over the next eight hours was one of the most extraordinary collapses and comebacks in the history of team sport. The American crowd, loud and hostile from the start, grew louder. The US team, led by a ferocious Justin Leonard, won point after point. Leonard holed an improbable 45 foot putt on the 17th against José María Olázábal. Olázábal still had a putt to halve the hole. Despite this the American players and their wives ran onto the green in premature, chaotic celebration.
“Those scenes will live with me forever. Not as a celebration of what golf should be — but as a reminder of what team sport does to people.”

— Colin Montgomerie, on Brookline 1999
The controversy made the event bigger. The fury made it matter more. The Ryder Cup needs the kind of tension that turns rational people inside out. Brookline delivered it in full.

MEDINAH AND THE ART OF THE IMPOSSIBLE COMEBACK

If Brookline was America’s greatest comeback, Medinah is Europe’s. Trailing 10–6 going into Sunday, the same impossible arithmetic. Europe did what no one would have predicted. The turning point arguably came the evening before. Ian Poulter, who appears to run on pure adrenaline and theatrical gestures, birdied five consecutive holes to keep Europe alive. Players in the team room watched and felt something shift.

THE SHOT THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING · MEDINAH, ILLINOIS

POULTER’S FIVE-BIRDIE RUN

Down with five holes to play, Poulter made birdies at 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18 to win his match and keep Europe’s faint hope alive. Rory McIlroy, watching from the team room, later said it was the moment he believed. On Sunday, Europe won 8.5 points from a possible 12. The final point came from a Martin Kaymer putt that secured the overall match 14½–13½. Players wept on the 18th green — not from relief alone, but from something deeper: the recognition that they had been part of something larger than any of them.

CATHEDRALS OF THE CUP

The Ryder Cup does not merely happen at great courses — it consecrates them. A handful of venues have become synonymous with the event’s defining chapters.

We are aiming to create a similar opportunity for players as the IGGC community develops. Some of the greatest courses in the World will be waiting to greet our members.

The inagural Team Shivers vs Team Malta for example was hosted at the fantastic Loch Lomond. Great camaradere and ever lasting friendships were formed. Everyone is eagerly awaiting this year’s renewal, being held at the Royal Malta Golf Club.

The Belfry, Warwickshire, has hosted four Ryder Cups and is the venue most permanently associated with the modern era. Sam Torrance wept openly after holing the winning putt in 1985. Christy O’Connor Jr hit perhaps the greatest pressure iron shot in the event’s history — a two-iron to the 18th — in 1989. The lake on the final hole has swallowed careers and delivered miracles in roughly equal measure.

Valderrama in Sotogrande, Spain, hosted the 1997 match with Seve Ballesteros as captain on home soil. Rain-soaked and operatic, played under a cloud of controversy about interference from the captain himself, Europe won by a single point. It remains the most emotionally charged setting the event has known.

Celtic Manor in Wales hosted a match in 2010 played over four days after relentless rain rendered large sections of the course unplayable. Graeme McDowell holed the winning putt, sank to his knees on the 16th fairway, and sobbed. Some moments arrive exactly as they were scripted to.

Move forward to the present day. For anyone that was in Rome at Marco Simone were treated to an amazing and somewhat comfortable spectacle if you were supporting Team Europe. Luke Donald’s team dismantled a star-studded US side with Viktor Hovland and Rory McIlroy in ruthless form throughout, winning comfortably and restoring European pride after the hammering at Whistling Straits two years prior.

Why it hits differently and always will:

1. No money ‘should’ change hands. The players are not paid to compete, or at least until recently. They should carry their country’s / continent's pride and nothing else.

2. Opponents become partners. World number ones who compete against each other 47 weeks a year must, for this one week, share a team room, a breakfast table, and a purpose.

3. The crowd changes the game. Golf galleries are, by long convention, polite. Not here. Ryder Cup crowds behave like football stands. Completely partisan, loud, occasionally over the line, its electric.

4. Match play cuts through everything. Stroke play rewards patience and the slow accumulation of a good week. Match play rewards nerve, boldness, and the ability to hole one putt when it matters most.

5. The captain carries it all. Strategy, pairings, order, tone, motivation. The Ryder Cup captain makes decisions in real time that no analyst can fully second-guess.

IGAMING GOLF CLUB · MAY 2025

TEAM SHIVERS VS TEAM MALTA — THE SPIRIT LIVES ON

Every great rivalry begins somewhere. Team Shivers has History of its own and my Team representing both the I Gaming community and Ex Pats In Malta 100% relish the challenge of making our own history for many years to come.

The iGaming Golf Club’s inaugural team match between Team Shivers and Team Malta carried that same spirit at Loch Lomond into a world Samuel Ryder could not have imagined. Its a global industry built on sport, technology and competition, now finding its own rituals and its own reasons to stand together on a first tee.

Like the original, this match is not about handicap index or prize money. It is about the particular pressure that only team golf creates: knowing that a missed putt matters not just to you, but to the person standing behind you on the fairway. It is about the captain’s choices — who plays with whom, who goes out first, who you trust when a match is tight and the afternoon is running away from you.

“The format strips everything away. No excuses, no bad weeks, no averaging out. Just you, your partner, and the next hole.”

The Ryder Cup had Seve and Olazábal, Woods and Mickelson, Team golf always produces its own folklore. Our partnerships don’t just end on the course, they click in the clubhouse as well and we are very much looking forward to this year’s edition of the ALL IN Platform PRESIDIO Trophy.

Team Shivers and Team Malta will write their own version of that story in May. The stage is different. The stakes, in their own way, are the same.