Bogey women

Golf’s Ryder Cup is uniquely irresistible. Like most show-stopping spectaculars, the biennial challenge boasts ‘a full supporting cast’, in this case the two distinctive dolled-up distaff teams — a shapely sorority of Stepford Sindies vs a bevy of Barbies — devoted cheerleaders geeing up their frowning fellows as they go about the sombrely obsessive business with mashie and putter. The phenomenon is a new one to international football, as the English learnt in the World Cup this summer when the late-night antics of the Wags — the players’ wives and girlfriends — were wincingly, shamelessly documented each morning by the London tabloids. But I was surprised this week to discover that America’s golfing Wags (though I assume more maturely and decorously) have a history when, by nice fluke, I came across this telling forecast in an ancient London Evening Standard of June 1937, before the sixth Ryder Cup teed off on the Southport and Ainsdale links. The paper’s tyro golfing writer predicted a home-side victory: ‘The nine-man foreign team’s distractions allow the British to begin the match on a general note of restrained optimism. The Americans have too many wives. Not that they have brought more than one each, but they have brought six in all, and it is my experience, or rather I have observed it to be other people’s, that women on these trips are an encumbrance equivalent roughly to conceding two shots per round.’ The writer was a 26-year-old bachelor, name of Henry Longhurst, wouldn’t you know. King Henry the First was way out, too — the US won the match in a stroll by 8–4.

Might the Wags tone it down a touch this year? Increasingly too ready show-stealers, dressed (and hair-dressed) identically, they daintily tiptoe the first couple of fairways to stand by their man as he fretfully wiggles and waggles and worries over his opening lie.