I’ve never been as nationalistic as most of my friends. Over the years, at a sporting event involving one of our national teams, you would be as likely to catch me chanting, “USA USA” as you would be to hear me hollering, “No More Beer! No More Beer!”
There have been exceptions, of course, mostly when we’re underdogs. World Cup rugby and soccer come quickly to mind. And, I must admit, I did somewhat regain my religion when our Olympic men’s hockey teams beat the “Rooskis” both in 1960 at Squaw Valley and again at Lake Placid in 1980.
Another deviation from this often-ill-advised behavioral trait pertains to golf’s biennial competitions between teams from Europe and the United States, namely the Ryder Cup, which, lo and behold, is once again upon us this week.
It’s never been much of a problem for me to get my red, white, and blue game face on for this event although I must admit it was even easier back when it was U.S. versus Britain in the days before they expanded the adversarial footprint to include the continent as a whole.
And that’s how it was back in 1963, the year the Ryder Cup insinuated itself forever into my sporting life. Back then the group I golfed and hung out with played Sand Hill Country Club at Fort Benning, Georgia, a somewhat comical layout within walking distance of our barracks at the 122d Signal Battalion, 2d Infantry Division.
For the most part we were inseparable. We played poker and pinochle and bridge together and developed a habit of staying up late at “our” corner table of the local beer garden or at the golf course clubhouse drinking pilsners and talkin’ Miles Davis, Jack Kerouac, John Coltrane, Joseph Heller, Thelonious Monk, Harper Lee, and, of course, J.D. Salinger.
To us they were heady times, but, then again, all times are “heady” if you’re paying attention to the “widening gyre,” as Yeats would say. And my buddy Gary probably paid as much if not more attention than most. It was he who got us referring to the impending 1963 Ryder Cup, which would be held just up the road in Atlanta, as “the Japhy.”
As with most of the convoluted thought patterns our group referred to as “the game,” solving the maze that led to this obscure reference depended upon whether your Kerouac studies had progressed past “On the Road” and on to his second published novel, “Dharma Bums.”
The protagonist of the latter, you see, was a West Coast Buddhist-poet-wilderness-guru named Japhy Ryder, a character Kerouac based on Gary Snyder, the original dharma bum — one in search of his essential Buddhist nature. Well, immediately, all of us bought in. From then on, the Ryder Cup was the “Japhy.”
One night, on the eve of the Cup, while in what might be accurately described as a somewhat-sober-but-ecstatic stupor, Gary and I lit out for Atlanta to see if we could somehow squirm on to the hallowed grounds of what I believe at that time was known as the Atlanta Athletic Club.
Whatever they called it then, it was the same legendary course Bobby Jones called home back in the day and is now known as East Lake, where this past Sunday Jim Furyk pocketed $11.35 million by winning both the PGA Tour Championship and the FedEx Cup.
Well, Gary and I got a bit off course that night and sometime before dawn found ourselves in a jail cell in the town of Griffin being questioned about our involvement as “outside agitators” in the civil-rights movement. College-aged kids with “Yankee accents” were a target demographic.
Now, in match-play golf, the format for the Ryder Cup, when you’re in the lead by as many holes as remain to be played, they refer to that as being “dormy.” The worst you could do, even if you lost every hole, would be to “halve” (tie) the match.
Gary and I figured that the good old boys of the Griffin police department went dormy at the point where the time it would take us to drive to the Japhy, once released, equaled the time until the final-day matches were all underway.
That moment passed with our second helping of breakfast grits as did our chance to witness the United States team under player-captain Arnold Palmer win going away, 23 to 9. They probably went dormy before we got back to the pilsner.
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and a free-lance writer with a background in commercial and community radio, among other pursuits. He has been a columnist and feature writer for various Park City publications going back to 1973.