Ryder Cup, day 2

I got to see a fair amount of the Ryder Cup action from Saturday, despite the fact that the broadcast was almost over before I sat down (the DVR is a fantastic invention) and the Americans are, again, failing miserably. They'll start Saturday's individual matches with the European team up 10-6. It's not over yet, but it's not a good situation.

A lot of what I saw reminded me of a couple of quotes from Wodehouse's golf stories. The Americans were not putting well. Tiger Woods, who I'm not sure has ever missed a 3 foot putt in a PGA event, missed a 3 foot putt that would have won a hole. Everywhere you looked, the Americans were rimming out putts.

"Young Parsloe...doesn't seem able to do a thing on the greens. He has been putting like a sheep with the botts."
- PG Wodehouse, "The Heart Of A Goof"

The Europeans, on the other hand, weren't missing putts. They were either making putts, or, an unbelievable number of times, not putting at all, because of the way they were sinking chips.

"He had not been prepared for this sort of thing. The way things were shaping, he felt that it should hardly surprise him now if the cups were to start jumping up and snapping at Bott's balls like starving dogs."
- PG Wodehouse, "High Stakes"

It was kind of like watching a game of H-O-R-S-E - one guy's slamming the ball of the driveway so that it goes over the garbage cans, bounces off the tree branch and banks in after rolling around the rim twice, the other guy's missing lay-ups...