Peter Williams: The mysterious resurrection of a quirky golfing non-event

Just how and why the Ryder Cup became such a phenomenon so quickly is one of sport's modern mysteries.

Its early history is well enough known. Beginning in 1927 as a teams match between professionals from the US and Britain, the Ryder Cup had degenerated into a series of predictable mismatches by 1977.

Interest, particularly in the US, was seriously waning because the British players were just not good enough. Jack Nicklaus provided the survival mechanism.

He noted one or two young players from continental Europe, particularly Spain, were beginning to make an impact. He suggested the British team become European.

The gin swillers at the British PGA protested with a deep-rooted chauvinism typical of the time but they had little option - say hello Europe or goodbye Ryder Cup.

The early US-Europe contests didn't reverse the trend but by 1983, something was brewing. Severiano Ballesteros had won a couple of major championships, Bernhard Langer was one of the world's best and the US won by only a point.

The breakthrough came in 1985, when Europe won for the first time. And they've won regularly since.

Almost immediately, the Ryder Cup took on a new meaning. Qualification for the teams became an intrinsic and intense part of the respective PGA Tours. Tickets were sold out almost as quickly as they went on sale and television rights' fees rose astronomically.

The Ryder Cup became a monstrous cash cow - but one where players still don't get paid - and it spawned lookalike events such as the Presidents and Solheim Cups.

But the Ryder Cup has also exposed a really ugly side to golf, where rampant nationalism and xenophobia has led to behaviour by players and fans that even the most liberally minded golf followers find distasteful. The American team's outrageous running on the 17th green at Brookline in Boston in 1999 after Justin Leonard holed a huge putt in his match with Jose-Maria Olazabal remains one of the most awful scenes golf has witnessed. The worst culprit, Tom Lehman, is this year's US captain.

And let's not forget the fashion crimes Ryder Cup teams commit against good taste in golfing attire.

But the real mystery of the Ryder Cup is how a kind of golf almost never played at top level captures the imagination of fans and sports editors around the world.

Newspapers must even revert to basics explaining just how foursomes and fourballs are played, and that's before pointing out what matchplay is. It's a nightmare of an event to cover on television because up to a dozen vital incidents could all happen at the same time and it must be even worse to watch at the venue for the same reason.

But all of the above are why a non-event little more than two decades ago has been transformed into a $100 million industry.

The Ryder Cup is different. It's passionate, quirky and often complicated. But it works and just 30 years after being on the edge of extinction, it's now an integral part of the international sports calendar.