Scots victim of a stitch-up

Brian Meek, The Herald, 28 September 2001

The long-awaited decision on the venue for the 2010 Ryder Cup is likely to be announced today. After days of wrangling, the joint committee of the European Tour and the Professional Golfers' Association will award the match to Celtic Manor in Wales, a course which requires to be radically altered to bring it up to an acceptable standard, with the Scottish entrants Gleneagles, Loch Lomond, Turnberry, and Carnoustie pipped at the post.

There will be a sour taste left in many mouths in Scotland. For this has not been a fair competition; instead it has been a race in which the finest runners have been nobbled, where threats have been made and promises broken. Frankly it has been a stitch-up.

It may well be that the Scots, in the shape of Gleneagles one suspects, are offered the Ryder Cup in 2014. While this sop is likely to be accepted, it is poor consolation for the effort, and money, put in by the bid committee and there are those who wonder whether in fact it will be delivered.

Popes have been selected with less acrimony than has gone on behind the scenes as golf's two leading organisations, the Tour and the PGA, have battled for supremacy. Scotland has been caught in the crossfire.

Ironically the two bodies are each headed by Scots, Ken Schofield for the Tour, Sandy Jones the PGA's top man. Their long friendship has been put under severe strain by recent events.

The two organisations formed a joint venture Ryder Cup Ltd in 1990. RCL is responsible for organising the home matches, venue selection, corporate sales, and TV sales. Revenue is evenly shared by the Tour and the PGA.

But the Tour, who provide the players for the European side, have argued that they should have the bigger slice of the profits.

Why were they so keen to go to Wales? For a start the reshaping of the Celtic Manor course is going to cost an estimated £12m and the contract has gone to European Golf Design, a subsidiary company of the Tour.

Secondly, the Welsh course is owned by multi-millionaire Terry Matthews. The Ryder Cup and rich men have long gone together like love and marriage: Jaime Patiño bought it for Spain at Valderrama in 1997, Michael Smurfit, one of Ireland's leading entrepreneurs, smoothed the way for the match to go to the K Club near Dublin in 2006. Dealing with someone who has an open cheque book is a lot easier than trying to persuade a committee. One sometimes feels the Ryder Cup committee would accept a pitch-and-putt course if the money was right.

Thirdly, Wales, rated among the poorest regions, qualifies for Objective One funds from the European Union.

Scotland did not have any of these advantages. All the Scots could boast of was their vastly superior courses, their considerable contribution to the Ryder Cup, enthusiastic support, and some cash, from the Scottish Executive plus strong financial underwriting from the Bank of Scotland. Some other major companies were expected to join a consortium once the bid had been accepted.

I think it highly unlikely that the bank, and the other companies lined up, will stay in financial support until 2014. They have shareholders to report to and, in the current economic situation, spending large sums on what is a form of corporate hospitality is difficult to justify.

There are no long lines of sponsors lining up to sponsor tournaments in Scotland - Standard Life pulled out of Loch Lomond last year - and this decision is hardly likely to encourage them to enlist.

In March of this year Schofield, in an interview given to a tabloid newspaper, indicated clearly that he favoured Celtic Manor. From that moment on the Scots were simply spitting into the wind.

They were told that the race "was still wide open"; in fact it was all over bar the award announcement. It was naïve of the Scottish bid committee to believe otherwise. The Tour used its muscle to bludgeon the PGA, some of whom favoured Scotland, threatening to withdraw the players and set up a rival competition between Europe and the USA unless Wales were given the 2010 slot.

Scotland's consolation prize is to be 2014. I am all in favour of our country benefitting from an event which brings with it an estimated £200m. But it is fair to ask: are the Continental Europeans, the Swedes, Danes, Spaniards, and Germans, who currently make up the bulk of the Ryder Cup side happy to concede that every home match between now and 2018 - at the earliest - is going to be staged in the British Isles? Ask Bernhard Langer or José María Olazábal that question and you might receive a very dry answer.

If you go into a competition, any bidding process, then you must be prepared to lose. But you are entitled to expect the rules are the same for everybody. In this instance they clearly were not.

Scotland loses out on Ryder Cup

Murray Ritchie, The Herald, 28 September 2001

Scotland has failed in its attempt to host the 2010 Ryder Cup but will stage the golfing event four years later, it was being predicted last night.

Behind the scenes in Edinburgh, there are bitter recriminations and allegations of sharp practice by those backing the apparently successful Welsh bid for the 2010 event.

But Henry McLeish's ministerial team, which poured millions into the bid, will be comforted by an expected announcement today that the tournament will come to Scotland in 2014.

"We are not taking this lying down," said a senior executive source. "You can expect a hell of a fuss. Whether we can change things remains to be seen."

Ministers are incensed that supporters of the Welsh bid appear to have triumphed by exploiting the politics of golf, in particular the determination of the European Tour to wrest control of the Ryder Cup, the world's biggest golfing occasion, from the Professional Golfers' Association.

A senior source said: "The bottom line is that the Tour told the PGA that if the big-money bid from Wales did not win, the tournament would be destroyed and started in another form in collaboration with the US PGA. It is a bit difficult for us to fight that sort of thing."

The formal decision will be announced at the Belfry in Warwickshire, where the tournament was due to begin today but was postponed for a year because of the terrorist atrocities in the US.

The first minister gave the Scottish bid his personal endorsement and was prepared to put £200m into promoting golf in Scotland between now and 2009. But it appears the Welsh offered more by way of investing in a course not yet completed at Celtic Manor.

The Welsh executive's success in attracting EU Objective One funding from Brussels is also said to be a factor.

The PGA and the Tour have three voting members each on the committee. The PGA has the casting vote this year which until now was thought to be enough to secure the tournament for Scotland. But one of the factors said to be crucially in favour of the Welsh is a company called European Golf Design which has a £12m contract to reshape Celtic Manor. It is a subsidiary of the European Tour.

There is speculation that the HBoS, a major Ryder Cup sponsor, will pull out on the basis that a snub to Scotland on this scale is unacceptable.

Ministers, however, will put on a brave face, arguing Scotland has secured a future Ryder Cup. For Mr McLeish it will be a Pyrrhic victory. He is unlikely to be around as first minister when the cup is played on a Scottish course, and the Tour's continental players, providing more than half the team, are impatient for their own countries to be hosts.