Thursday, September 18, 2008

Opening Ceremonies

I watched the Ryder Cup Opening Ceremonies on ESPN News today. Aside from technical glitches (like no sound when the Stenson pairing was announced) and what appeared to be more time spent on Azinger and his morning match players, it was an ok event. Faldo was either really nervous or really emotional during his speech. At times I thought he was actually going to cry. The players looked really nice in their suits (the Europeans, I didn't spend too much time watching the US team).

One thing I'm getting annoyed at is the Golf Channel assigning Kelly Whatshername to cover Faldo. The conspiracy theorist in me has all kinds of suspicions about that. Faldo had better be careful.

I do have to give some credit to Azinger during the Opening Ceremonies. Dan Hicks tried his best to get either Faldo or Azinger to mention Faldo's list of pairings that was the talk of the media yesterday and Azinger completely ignored the not so subtle hint by Hicks to bring it up.

And while I wasn't paying that close attention to the wives and girlfriends, I don't think they were all dressed alike in the same outfits. If that's right, then I'm very happy. I didn't like the matching outfits of two years ago. Too Stepford-like and I can't imagine the men were anything but scared when they saw that.

As for the ceremonies themselves, the 2006 version was much better for entertainment value, with various artsy performances. I guess the US organizers remembered that Hunter Mahan wasn't getting paid for being there and didn't want to take up too much of his valuable time.

One last observation: There's a reason why these guys wear hats.

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