Like me, I know you’re psyched for the Ryder Cup two weeks from now, that every other year team competition between the best golfers in the U.S. and Europa.

The U.S. team is set and although Patrick Reed was passed over, Bryson DeChambeau was an automatic pick. Which makes it a lot harder to root for the home team at Whistling Straits in Wisconsin. I wholeheartedly concur with this Alex Kirshner dissection of DeChambeau:

“. . . his positive COVID test in late July knocked him out of the Olympics. Fortunately, DeChambeau healed up, though he said he lost some swing speed. Reporters asked DeChambeau if he regretted not getting the vaccine. He said he did not, and that he’d “tried to take all the necessary precautions” not to catch the virus (except, you know, for the most important one). But DeChambeau—who, it bears repeating, very much likes to fashion himself as a science guy and a deep thinker—had more to say. In one of the most embarrassing bits of vaccine misdirection anyone in sports had attempted all year, he tried to cast his decision as a move to keep vulnerable people safe. He explained that the vaccine needed to be preserved for those in worse health than himself. (By that time, the government had a surplus of doses.) ‘I don’t need it,’ he said. ‘I’m a healthy, young individual that will continue to work on my health. I don’t think taking the vaccine away from someone who needs it is a good thing.’

That bit should’ve ended anyone’s idea that DeChambeau is especially committed to science. But it mostly revealed his lack of interest in thinking seriously about anything. The audacity of framing not getting vaccinated as a way to help vulnerable people, rather than something that could literally kill them, makes him something between a fraud and the absolute thickest person in sports. Not getting vaccinated is a worse thing to subject other people to than anything anyone has ever hollered at him from along a fairway. There are people who command honest conversations about whether they deserve the grief they get. This isn’t one.”

Besides the inclusion of the American Knucklehead, the Euros are easy to root for because they WANT IT so much more and their fans and them celebrate their upset victories with incredible élan.

And so this golf fan says to hell with the political boundaries and passports, may the team with the fewest knuckleheads and the most dogs win.

Postscript: Last night after eighteen year old British tennis phenom Emma Raducanu won her semifinal match at the US Open, she attempted to give her wrist bands to some grade school girls standing nearby in the first row of Arthur Ashe stadium. But she couldn’t because some despicable twenty-something men intercepted the tossed sweat bands. Which I hereby offer as the most embarrassing moment for young males in Western History. As a non-young male I was ashamed of my gender. After pocketing the sweat bands from the younger Raducanu, they set their sights on her towel and other souvenirs she was about to dispense with. Instead of dealing with the six foot tall LOSERS, she huddled with a security guard who made sure the young girls ended up with her towel. Tar and feathers might be too good for those hapless dudes.