Wah! Weekend Sports

Today is even more a maudlin Monday than usual. It rained most of the night and the skies are gray and drizzly again this morning. More than maudlin, it’s also depressing. My main tv activity on weekends is to watch sports, and this weekend I had the 2018 Ryder Cup in France and the Cardinals versus their old nemesis, the Seattle Seahawks. Good. A chance to watch two victories, one in golf and one in football. But it was bad, so bad.

I watched all twenty-four hours of the Ryder Cup. What a depressing fiasco that was (unless you were from Europe, and then it was grand). Not only did the Euros outplay the Americans (especially when it came to putting), they also out-finessed them by setting up the course, Le Golf National, to be the most punitive in Ryder Cup history. “Let’s see now,” Bjorn and his vice captains must have said, “How can we take the power game away from the Americans? Oh, sure, we’ll just make the fairways so narrow they can’t hit ‘em and make the rough so deep and nasty they can’t get out with a machete. Then let’s slow the greens down because the Americans hate slow greens. Yeah, that should do it.” And it did. Oh, my, how it did, a 17½ to 10½ spanking. Of what I call the bombers on both sides, Americans Tony Finau and Justin Thomas came out alive, with Finau going 2-1-0, and Thomas 4-1-0. On the Euro side, bombers Rory McIlroy went 2-3-0 and John Rahm went 1-2-0. But on the America team, look what the long hitters did: Fowler 1-3-0, Johnson 1-4-0, Koepka 1-2-1, Mickelson 0-2-0, Watson, 1-2-0, and Tiger 0-4-0.  I believe that awful rough was responsible for most of those losses. After the first session of the Four Ball on Friday, the U.S. team took three of the four points, and they must have been smiling. But that was probably the last time in all three days that they had occasion to smile. I don’t think Tiger smiled even once in all three days. Maybe he did when he was introduced on the first tee on Friday, but it would have been only a tiny, no-teeth smile, and that was probably the last time. I hope I live long enough to see how it goes in Wisconsin in 2020. I think they should have the rough really short so the bombers could bang away with impunity, place bunkers all across the middle of all the fairway right at 290 yards so that the bombers can go over them and the shorter Euros have to lay up or go in them. And then get the greens stimping at 14. That should do it.

I keep thinking the Cardinals can’t be as bad as they looked in the first three games. And they didn’t on Sunday. They actually looked like they could win a game. But they didn’t. They just didn’t look as bad in losing as they did in losing their first three games. Josh Rosen looks like he can be very good if only receivers catch what he delivers . . . which they didn’t. Even sure-handed Larry Fitzgerald dropped two he would ordinarily catch. Then there are those questionable late-in-the-game calls from the sidelines, with just under three minutes left and the score tied 17-17. Cardinals’ ball, first-and-ten from about the Seahawks’ 35. What to do? What to do? Winning teams and winning coaches keep the drive alive and take it as far as they can: either score a touchdown or eat up almost all the clock. What did Coach Wilks do? He called three running plays up the middle that gained about six yards total. Then he sent in Dawson to kick a 45-yard field goal that, even if he made it, would still leave nearly two minutes in the game. He missed it. The Seahawks took over and moved the ball rather easily into long field goal range for Janikowski, who made it as time ran out. Final: Seahawks 20, Cardinals 17. See, winners move the ball and losers try to sit on it. How depressing. Oh, well, maybe next year.