Spectators started singing Sweet Caroline but there was no place for spontaneity at the cliche-ridden opening ceremony
From the deckchairs and beanbags of the spectator village, through parched and fraying voices, came the strains of a song. They had come from all over Europe, taken holiday leave and emptied bank accounts, to join the party. And as they waited patiently in the baking Roman heat, they struck up – organically and quite unbidden – a chorus of Sweet Caroline. It was quite nice. Still, it was nothing that couldn’t be drowned out by an industrial-strength sound system, some synthetic drum beats downloaded straight off Uppbeat and a woman spewing banal platitudes for an hour. Little people of the 44th Ryder Cup: shush. We will decide how you will be entertained.
And so from the eternal city came the eternal opening ceremony: an inexorable treadmill of pumping music and glossy video montages and speeches so incoherent they verged on crimes against language. Was this sport? Clearly not. But by the same token it was evidently the stuff of which modern sport seems to be made these days: a kind of hydrogenised sport-adjacent substance, the fatty tissue of sport, the bit we now have to wade through to get to the thing itself. “There was something good that we lost along the way,” the singer-songwriter and celebrity golf fan Tom Grennan sang from the stage. Know how you feel, mate. Know how you feel.
