Europeans Are Alive and Well in Sports’ World

I guess it’s time to call in the cavalry. Sound the bugles. Circle the wagons.

Where’s John Wayne when you need him? Buffalo Bill? Gen. Patton? Heck, Gen. Custer. Tippecanoe and Tyler, too. Anybody.

What’s happening to the land of the pioneers? The home of the brave? The land of the Minutemen, the Green Mountain Boys. It’s getting its ears boxed regularly by the sons from the old country, the foreign legions. What do we do next--give ‘em back Bunker Hill? George III must be laughing his head off. Teddy Roosevelt would be beside himself.

Perhaps you noticed that, for the third time in a row, we blew the Ryder Cup matches to a combined European team last week. We got clobbered, 14-14.

That’s a clobbering because we’re supposed to win Ryder Cup matches 23 1/2-8 1/2, as we did in Houston in 1967, or 18 1/2-9 1/2, as we did in England in 1981. These things used to be as one-sided as the Boston Tea Party or the battle of Yorktown.

When is a tie not a tie? Well, when it leaves the championship right where it is. If you managed a draw with Mike Tyson, it would be a great moral victory. But that’s the only kind of victory it would be. He’d still be champion.

So are the European golfers. We didn’t even get a moral victory. We got our pants kicked again. The Ryder Cup, emblematic of geographic golfing superiority, stays where it has been since 1983. In Britain.

It’s not a fluke, it’s a trend.

Consider what’s happened to us of late in sports. For the second year in a row, the prestigious Masters was won by a Brit, and, for the fifth time in nine years, it was won by a foreigner.

And, that’s not all. Look at our tennis Open. For the fifth year in a row, it was won by a foreigner. In fact, it’s been five years since an American even got in the final.

We used to win not only our own national tennis title but England’s as well. We haven’t won Wimbledon since 1984. We haven’t won the Davis Cup in eight years.

A Brazilian won “our” auto race, the Indianapolis 500, this year. And Sunday he won the CART-PPG Indy car championship, emblematic of the national driving championship of America. And the automobile was supposed to be as American an institution as pumpkin pie. The automobile is to the American what the camel is to the Bedouin.

What has happened? Are we getting soft? Bored? Don’t we turn out Jack Armstrongs any more? Spoiled by too much money? Too much affluence? White bread? Junk food? How come these effete Continental types are, so to speak, handing us our heads? When did the rest of the world stop being pushovers?

Perhaps you noticed, we even lost the basketball championship in the Olympics last year. That’s basketball, for cryin’ out loud! We invented the damned game.

There are as many opinions as to what has happened as there are people to express them. On the tube over the weekend, one broadcaster, Ben Wright, blamed the all-exempt tour for the demise of the dominant American player. It’s too easy to make money in golf today without winning. So why strain?

I have another theory. Like most of mine, it is not entirely scientific. In fact, it tends to be simplistic.

But it is this: Athletes in Europe have caught up to us simply because they have gone nearly a half-century without a war.

What we are seeing is almost the first generation in a century that was allowed to grow up normally and not have to go marching off to war at the time it should have been heading toward the playing fields, the gymnasiums, the weight rooms. It’s the first generation in a long time that has not had its eyes shot out, or its limbs shot off, or its lives blown up on a battlefield.

How many potentially fine golfers or tennis players or runners or jumpers do you suppose lie under white crosses in poppy fields in Flanders? How many do you think went home on crutches or in wheelchairs in two world wars?

Do you remember that, before World War I, the Brits were so superior to us in golf that it was headline news all over the world when a Yank, Francis Ouimet, won our Open over the great Brits, Ted Ray and Harry Vardon, at Brookline?

But that was 1913. The next year, the world went crazy. The Empire marched off to war and the flower of English manhood was slaughtered in the trenches--908,371 killed and 2,090,212 wounded.

It’s not hard to imagine how many fine athletes were included in that carnage. Remember, you get your soldiery from the fittest specimens of the race.

No country escaped. Germany lost 1,773,700 killed and 4,216,058 wounded. France’s figures were 1,357,800 dead and 4,266,000 maimed. Russia lost 1,700,000 dead and 4,950,000 wounded.

The time between wars was not sufficient to replenish the ranks before Europe marched off to war again. This time, the British lost 544,596 killed, or about 1% of the population. Germany lost 14 million dead, 3 million of them soldiers, and the Soviet Union lost nearly 8 million soldiers killed.

In the periods between, and immediately after, the great European wars, Americans had no trouble at all going over and winning British Opens--and Ryder Cups--at will. Bobby Jones used to win the British Open any time he really felt like it and, when Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus went over, so did they. Ben Hogan won the only British Open he ever played in and Sam Snead won the first British Open he played in with a 290. Sam would have liked to get a field like that every week--one he could beat with four 73s.

In the decade of the ‘70s, Americans won every British Open but one. But do you know that when Mark Calcavecchia won the British Open--barely--this year, he was the first American to win it since 1983?

Europe hasn’t marched to war this half-century. Its kids are getting a chance to grow up, to play games, lift weights, take instruction. It stands to reason, there are going to be more of them and they are going to be better.

So, when Nick Faldo wins our Masters and gets in a playoff for our Open and wins the British Open, the proposition is not: Would Nick Faldo have been able to do this when Hogan and Snead and Sarazen and Jones were in their prime? The proposition is: Would there even have been a Nick Faldo in their prime?

I suspect that Europe will win a lot of Ryder Cups--and tennis opens and British Opens--now that they’re not wiping out the heart of a generation every 20 years.