Say, Old Sport : THE RYDER CUP, PLAYED FOR NATIONAL PRIDE, NOT MONEY, IS GOLF AS IT WAS MEANT TO BE

THE RYDER CUP. FIRST OF ALL, WHAT IS IT? Care to guess? * That yacht race they hold every few years in Australia or San Diego that Dennis Conner wins? No, that’s the America’s Cup. * How about that series of horse races they hold every fall at Churchill Downs or Belmont? Guess again. That’s the Breeders’ Cup. * Well, maybe it’s that hockey thing where they all skate around at the end and congratulate each other and pretend they’re happy to lose. Forget it. Stanley Cup. * They got a cup for women’s tennis, men’s tennis, probably croquet and squash, but this ain’t it. * If you were to stop people on the streets of America and quiz them, three out of three wouldn’t know the Ryder Cup from a teacup. * A pity. Because the Ryder Cup, which begins Thursday at Kiawah Island, S.C., deserves all the recognition it can get. In many ways, it is sport’s finest hour. Games at their best. The game is international golf. Europe vs. the United States every two years. No riots in the seats. Just an occasional murmured “Lovely shot, old man!” A gentleman’s competition. Games as they used to be. As they ought to be. * First of all, it’s as patriotic as a yellow ribbon around an oak tree. A real flag-waver. It should be played to a Sousa march. Kate Smith should sing. John Wayne should ride in on a white horse. * It’s chivalric. Jack Nicklaus once made a knee-knocking seven-foot putt on the last hole of a Ryder Cup, then reached over graciously and knocked away Tony Jacklin’s own two-break, live-snake six-footer for a gimme, even though it meant they halved the match. Ivanhoe lives in Ryder Cup lore. * Don’t mix it up with those hodgepodge Davis Cup challenges in tennis, where the seeds are often a bigger mystery than a motel register and the spoiled darlings with the headache bands and two-armed backhands frequently and abusively refuse to play for their country if they have a more lucrative commitment. Or even a good movie they want to see. * Professional golfers consider Ryder Cup selection the highest honor. They vie for inclusion. They check their Ryder Cup points the way a broker checks the Dow Jones. * It’s not unusual for a player who has just won a big tournament and $300,000 to come into the press tent, throw his hat in the air and say, “Hot dog! This puts me on the Ryder Cup team.” Only this year, a premier player, Paul Azinger, withdrew from a prestigious--and lucrative--major, the PGA, because he was afraid he might aggravate an injury and thus not be able to fulfill his Ryder commitment.

Match that around tennis. Or even around the Olympics. Or any sport. Baseball players have been known to pass up All-Star games. Footballers duck the Pro Bowl. Basketball players scorn the Olympics.

There has never been a recorded instance of a golfer passing up the Ryder Cup team. It’s not the money. There’s hardly enough for expenses. For years, Ryder Cup participation cost the player out of pocket, not including the tournaments he would have to pass up to compete.

It’s not exemptions on the tour, a golfer’s other form of payment. There are no exemptions on the tour for Ryder Cup play. You play for pride, not pocket.

WHAT THEN IS THE MYSTIQUE OF THE RYDER CUP? WELL, THERE IS the nature of golf itself. Or of golfers themselves.

Golf is not ordinarily a team game. It is a game of rugged individualists, playing the most ruggedly individualistic sport of all. There are no teammates to shift the blame to, no guys in striped shirts to monitor the game. Your opponent is yourself, or the course, or the weather. Not your fellow players.

It is such an individualistic sport, it is difficult to find a real yardstick to measure the elite of the game. The Ryder Cup tells you that you belong. It’s not a suspect stat like money won. (For years, you could make more money winning the Milwaukee Open than the British Open.) But the Ryder Cup recognizes the distinction--you get 125 Ryder points for winning a major, 90 for second, and you get 75 points for winning an ordinary tournament, 45 for second. It’s really the only place where the game pauses every two years and says to a select group of players: “You are the best in the business.” The Ryder Cup is their Oscar.

What’s more, the Ryder Cup gets golf back to its basics--golf the way it’s played on a million other rounds yearly, golf the way truck drivers, stockbrokers, movie stars, presidents, kings and caddies play it. Golf-as-it-was-meant-to-be-played. Head to head. Hole by hole. Twosome against twosome. Golf the way the Scots invented it. None of this la-di-da medal play in which the winner is determined by total strokes over several rounds. It gets us back to an area of golf that money (and TV) made all but obsolete.

So why hasn’t the Ryder Cup been a major media event historically?

Well, to begin with, it was as one-sided as a Middle East war. It was hard to get excited about a foregone conclusion. Once, Americans won it 13 times in a row, another time, seven in a row, and 21 out of 22 times over one long stretch. It was about as competitive as the electric chair.

That began to change about a decade ago when the British reluctantly realized that the Boston Tea Party was never going to be avenged on a golf course, that the colonials were still out of hand. They tell the story of the Ryder Cupper from deep in the heart of Texas who was asked for advice by a partner who was worried about an opponent on the morrow. “Does he talk like he’s constipated and say ‘sed-yool’ for schedule?” our hero wanted to know. “You got it!” said his friend. “Then, don’t worry,” sniffed the Texan. “Limeys cain’t putt.”

The Brits must have come to that realization on their own. They finally reached out in 1979 and, so to speak, brought in the Hessians again--continental Europeans.

Golf had grown on the continent. The dashing Spaniard, Severiano Ballesteros, with his bullfighter good looks and El Cid attack, had all but surrounded the game in dear old Blighty, and he inspired other continental types from Stuttgart (Bernhard Langer) to Seville (Jose-Maria Olazabal) to take it up. For once, Europe had more golfers than soldiers.

It wasn’t long before the Ryder Cup was not only competitive but downright un-American. In 1985, shockingly, for the first time in 28 years, America lost. But that was on English soil. Two years later--at Jack Nicklaus’ own course, no less--for the first time America lost on American soil.

You would have thought the Brits had retaken Bunker Hill. The golf world hadn’t been so shocked since Fleck beat Hogan. You would have thought they had burned the White House again. John Paul Jones would be whirling in his grave. George Washington would have been scolding: “I told you about those entangling alliances.”

WHEN THE RYDER CUP CAME INTO BEING IN THE MID-’20S--IT WAS the brainchild of a British seed merchant, Samuel Ryder--it was widely believed that the British were the superior golfers of the world. After all, it was their game. A team of Britons had just vanquished a like number of Americans, 13 1/2 to 1 1/2, in a 1926 exhibition match. The Brits of that day not only won their own Open, they won ours with some frequency.

That, of course, was shortly to change. After the war, they were no match at all for the Ben Hogans, Sam Sneads, Byron Nelsons et al. They tell the story of the time American team captain Ben Hogan protested the depth of the grooves in the British clubs at a Ryder Cup in Portland. His players protested: “For God’s sake, Ben! We’ve got Dutch Harrison, Lloyd Mangrum, Herman Keiser, Byron Nelson, Sam Snead, Ben Hogan and Jimmy Demaret. What do we care what they do to their grooves?” The Americans won--11 matches to one.

Of course, it is hard to tell how many potentially fine young British players, new young Harry Vardons or Ted Rays, ended up in crashed bombers or on barbed wire.

If the chagrin was coast-to-coast when the upstart Europeans won in the United States, it was epochal when we couldn’t avenge it in Britain in 1989. That was to have been the year of the great pay-back, when we were to have restored order and American hegemony. Ballesteros was getting old. Bernhard Langer’s putting woes had worsened. We had only the historically limited-skilled Brits, a few overaged Irishmen and a still wet-behind-the-ears Olazabal to contend with. And we were taking them on with the likes of Tom Watson, Curtis Strange, Payne Stewart, Fred Couples and company.

No one wants to use the word choke in a sports story. It’s basically unfair, a term used usually by the uninformed. But, an inordinate number of four-foot putts seemed to have been missed. An inordinate number of balls seemed to have been hit into the water. A community goiter seemed detectable.

And the American forces reckoned without the abilities of an undersized, cocky little Welshman named Ian Woosnam. They miscalculated the contributions of the middle-level British players such as Mark James and Howard Clark. And Seve Ballesteros wasn’t as old as they hoped. He won two of his matches, halved one and lost to Paul Azinger one-up.

It was a resounding defeat for the Americans. Oh, the official score was 14-14, but as a Southern writer once wrote about a Notre Dame-Georgia Tech game that ended in an upset: “Georgia Tech trounced Notre Dame here today, 3-3.”

The tie meant that the cup stayed in England. The Ryder Cup, which we held from 1935 to 1957 and from 1959 to 1985, has now resided in England since 1985. We had never before failed to get it back immediately, had never lost (or halved) two in a row, never mind three.

NOW, WE HAVE TO GO TO KIAWAH ISLAND TO TRY TO REDRESS AN embarrassment. Or compound it.

First of all, even though the course--laid out by noted course designer Pete Dye--is American, it’s not going to favor either side. It’s brand new. It’s never had a tournament. No one has a real line on it. The players are going to take one look at its soggy swampland and grumble: “Very nice, but tell me, what did they do with the alligators?”

It’s a links (ocean-bordering) course, which should make the Brits feel at home. They’re used to playing with the Atlantic as a lateral water hazard. It’s long, (7,400 yards, yet), which should favor the Americans (and Woosnam) and their big drive game. Length off the tee is not always critical. Europe’s short-hitting Christy O’Connor had a 2-iron to the green for his second shot on the last hole in the last Ryder Cup. Freddy Couples had a 9-iron. Christy put his 2-iron within seven feet. Freddy shanked his 9-iron into the crowd. So much for length off the tee.

It’s got lots of water--which may be bad news to Americans Mark Calcavecchia and Payne Stewart, both of whom hit into water on the last hole in 1989.

The Americans have, so to speak, an ace in the hole. Their non-playing captain, Dave Stockton, is a man who understands something besides drive-and-an-8-iron golf, which the American tour encourages. A short knocker in his playing days, Dave’s best asset (he won two majors) was his tenacity and complete indiscourageability.

He well realizes that the Ryder format calls for adroit pairing. The first two days call for partner golf--alternate-shot play in one set of matches and best-ball of partners in the other. (The third and final day simply calls for singles play matching all 12 of each team’s players.) The linking calls for Veloz and Yolanda, not Laurel and Hardy, players who won’t get each other into nice messes. Stockton recalls the only Ryder Cup match he ever lost; he was paired with Jack Nicklaus, of all people. Says the short-hitting Stockton of his long-hitting partner: “I put him in places he’d never been, and he put me in places I’d never been--in other words, I’d leave him a 4-wood second shot to the green where he was used to an 8-iron, and he’d leave me the 8-iron where I was used to the wood. We couldn’t get in a rhythm.”

It may be one reason Stockton surprised the golf establishment by picking 49-year-old Raymond Floyd as his wild-card member this year, bypassing such staple players as Tom Watson and Tom Kite. It is the captain’s notion that Floyd, a gritty player from the old school, will be paired with the brilliant but unpredictable Couples and keep him in the fairway.

Why haven’t we won the last three times? What has happened to American golf? Well, probably, the usual. Money. An American golfer wins a big tournament and takes off on a round of corporate outings, appearance-money-guaranteed foreign tournaments, non-golf for big money. His game atrophies; his competitive instinct dulls. He shrugs. He tells you, “Well, the game’s tougher now.”

The game might be tougher, the players aren’t.

And that may explain why Stockton is banking on Floyd, who played when you had to putt to make money or you went home to clean clubs for a living.

Maybe Stockton wants someone who remembers how it was--back in the days when, if someone spoke with a constipated accent and said “sed-yool,” he was all yours.