Team USA and their teammates pose for a photo before heading to the Ryder Cup. Photo: RyderCupUSA
The more you watch of the Ryder Cup, the more you feel like it should be renamed «bring your wife to the work week.» This is the only moment in the sporting calendar when important people are treated not as decorations, but as the centerpieces of the spectacle.
Even at Wimbledon, Andy Murray's wife Kim is portrayed as an impeccably coiffed bystander. But in the intense golf spectacle, the partners take center stage, with matching outfits, prime opening ceremony seats and even fashion photo ops. Few could forget how, in 2010, Corey Pavin's wife Lisa appeared on the cover of Avid Golfer magazine wearing a red, white and blue flag with the headline: «Yes, captain.»
Fast forward 13 years and Mrs. Pavin's spirit is alive and well in Rome. Jena Sims, Brooks Koepka's wife, is an influencer who posted on Instagram how on the couple's wedding day, she gifted her husband a gray jacket lined with photos of her latest lingerie photo shoot.
Max Homa's wife Lacey's TikTok channel lovingly documents her lifestyle as a PGA Tour WAG. It's reasonable to assume that neither is too shy about embracing the alternative Ryder Cup format as a seven-day beauty parade.
This spectacle of women marching down fairways behind their husbands in color-coded harmony isn't just a social media phenomenon. Fast forward to Belfry 1993 and you'll remember European wives dressing in knits so colorful you'd think twice about giving them as an ironic Christmas gift. In 1999, numerous photographs surfaced of Tabitha Furyk shopping with Julie Crenshaw as they picked out evening dresses for a gala in Brooklyn.
So far so harmless. But as we begin another week of two captains checking each other's wives' names at every turn, it seems appropriate to wonder why this custom still persists. We live in a time when it seems tone-deaf and even rude to portray the role of women in sports as decorative. And yet, the Ryder Cup is enjoying it: players unite their spouses in a mobile support group.
Wives and girlfriends of Team Europe in 1993, unflattering jumpers were worn. Photo: Getty Images/Stephen Munday
No other sport has anything like it. Take last week's Laver Cup in Vancouver, billed as tennis' answer to the Ryder Cup, but with one major difference: Bjorn Borg's wife Patricia didn't have to sit courtside waving a little European flag. Of course, those who join the biennial golf WAG choir seem perfectly happy. Peter Hanson's wife Sanna spoke about her experience in Medina in 2012: “Even though I'm just a wife, I'm treated like a star. You are taken care of in a completely different way. They even have spa days.”
There's also the added factor that every other week of the year, golf becomes a surprisingly solitary activity. The players are lone wolves, often on another continent, without their families, and only their caddies for company. It won't hurt them if their wives are always present for the most intense team building of their lives.
Obviously, this was the point of view of the respected Mrs. Pavin. When asked about her expanded role at Celtic Manor, where she will design the daily menu for American players, furniture for the team rooms and even the decor of the clubhouse, she answered with some seriousness: “When I hear people say: Rider «Cups, why are the wives so involved?» I think: “Why not?” Golf is a very individual sport, so when you come home, your wife is your best friend, your confidant, your lover, your sports psychologist. «.
Except these wives appear in Ryder Cup mode and serve as little more than props. What has always been special about the event is that it has been an elaborate show of domestic bliss — sometimes with hilarious results. Five years ago in Paris, photographers asked American players to turn around and kiss their wives or girlfriends. Only Rickie Fowler didn't, and so in one of the greatest images of all time, he stood shrugging in the middle of a massive kiss, looking like a real gooseberry.
American celebrations in 2016 were a carefully choreographed show of marital bliss for everyone except Rickie Fowler. Photo: Getty Images/Scott Halleran
It all looks so staged, this positioning of wives as trophies. And you wonder how long such a decorative gift can last. The fact that Ryder Cup WAGs are happy with their selection of players is not in itself a justification for golf continuing to do so.
In 2018, there was a scandal in Formula 1 when the owners of Liberty Media proposed to abandon grid girls. Overall it smacked of an awakening, with many girls protesting, saying they were pleased to have the drivers' names on the grid, insisting they did not feel humiliated or vulnerable in any way.
But the Women's Sports Foundation's view prevailed that it was «disappointing to use women as event accessories rather than as the centerpiece of the sport.»
The same accessorizing continues in golf, without any shame. But times are changing. In football, England's WAGs were such an integral part of the 2006 World Cup story that one young woman went for a run in Baden-Baden simply hoping to be spotted by the paparazzi.
Now things are much more subdued: indeed, when Aaron Ramsdale's fiancée Georgina was photographed yawning in Qatar without her knowledge, the Football Association reacted furiously, threatening journalists with bans.
>Golf, a sport , which has a long history of problems with gender stereotyping, is an exception as it brazenly embraces the WAG circus. While most sports are desperate to empower women, the Ryder Cup represents them in a manner more in keeping with a 1970s game show. At best it is a puzzling anachronism.
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