To See One of the Last Home-Field Advantages in Sports, Watch the Ryder Cup

In major sports, arenas are increasingly identical and teams can feel at home while away. But in the biennial Ryder Cup, Michael Rosenberg writes, the road is still uncomfortable—and that's beautiful.

Home field, home court and home ice don’t seem to mean much anymore. But home fairways sure do. At a time when professional athletes use all sorts of financial, scientific and statistical tools to thrive on the road, it is harder than ever to fly across the Atlantic Ocean and win the Ryder Cup.

Consider: Great Britain and Ireland welcomed the rest of Europe to their Ryder Cup team in 1979. In the next nine Ryder Cups, home teams went 4-4-1. Since then, home teams are 10-2. The trend is actually getting more pronounced—the last four Ryder Cups have all been blowouts in favor of the home team.

The U.S. can break that trend at Marco Simone Golf & Country Club this week. But to do it, the Americans will have to overcome a hostile crowd and a course set up by Europeans to give their players an advantage.

At the 2018 Ryder Cup at Le Golf National in Paris, most of these fans were rooting for the Europeans—a scene American players only experience once every four years.  :: Luke Walker/Getty Images

The Ryder Cup has always been great theater. It is no longer a blood feud between European Tour and PGA Tour players—most stars play on the PGA Tour, and the only blood feud is with LIV. But it is especially compelling now, in part, because it provides such a distinct advantage to the home team—for reasons both physical and psychological.

To understand why, you should first look around. In most major sports, home-team winning percentages have gone down in recent years. There are several reasons for this. Arenas are more cavernous, and the best seats are usually filled by the wealthiest fans, not the most passionate—and, because everything is supposed to be nice these days, arena experiences tend to be uniform. Floors don’t have as many dead spots. Visiting locker rooms are almost all more plush than home locker rooms were 25 years ago. No NBA or NHL arena provides the home edge that Boston Garden and Chicago Stadium once did. (The Garden, which closed in 1995, did not even have air conditioning.)

If venues do have quirks, teams have analytics staffs to identify them and forward-thinking coaching staffs to neutralize them. Major League Baseball teams have data on the effects of every opposing ballpark.

It is now routine for players to fly on private planes, stay in their own rooms in first-class hotels and have a medical and training staff that can attend to their health proactively. They can come closer than ever before to replicating the feeling of being at home.

Teams have also gotten much smarter about rest, and they have the resources to apply the knowledge. It is common for NFL teams in the Pacific time zone to spend an entire week out east between East Coast games rather than adjust to jet lag and time-zone differences. The MLB Players Association successfully bargained for earlier start times on getaway days—with some limits on how early the first pitch of a series can be. NFL teams can limit the effect of crowd noise by sending plays into the huddle via headset and use silent counts at the line of scrimmage.

It was once commonly accepted that refs favored home teams and superstars. There is still some grumbling about that, of course, but instant replay plays no such favorites and league offices watch officials much more closely than they once did. A zebra who constantly favors the home team will get downgraded and lose postseason assignments.

There are still advantages to playing at home. Hockey teams get the last change before a faceoff. Home football crowds still occasionally force the visiting team to burn a timeout. NBA teams shoot better at home. But the advantages tend not to be as pronounced as they once were.

The Ryder Cup is a different deal. In fact, many of the trends that neutralize home-venue advantage in other sports actually accentuate it in golf.

Golfers are more pampered than ever. Stars fly on private planes and have “teams” to help them prepare for events. They expect every course to be in pristine condition and every club to be adjusted to their exact specifications, which are determined, in part, by whatever they see on TrackMan. The cumulative effect is that they aren’t as accustomed to being uncomfortable as previous generations were. A hostile crowd at the Ryder Cup can rattle them—and because they only face one every two years, they can’t ever really get used to it.

Then there is the golf course itself. The Europeans have more experience on it—it has hosted the Italian Open in each of the last three years—and the home captain gets to set it up. In 1997, European captain Seve Ballesteros ordered rough to be grown in the middle of the 17th fairway, ostensibly to hinder the long-hitting Americans, especially a young Tiger Woods. That was extreme. But in 2018, Le Golf National was set up to favor strong iron players—and, therefore, the Europeans.

The rise in data-driven analytics means it is easier to know exactly what changes would benefit the home team—and it is totally legal to implement them.

Rory McIlroy said last year that Americans tend to excel from 150 yards in, and so in “trying to set (Marco Simone) up, it's a challenge to get your tee shots within that range … some of the tee shots have been brought in and the rough has been brought in on either sides. You've got bunkers that you can carry at 300 or 310 but the angle it's created is very, very tight and you're hitting into smaller windows.”

This would be like an NBA team changing the shape of the three-point line or raising the baskets a few inches.

The U.S. has not won a Ryder Cup in Europe since 1993. For some of that time, commitment was a problem. It was hard to get U.S. players to travel to the venue earlier to scout the course, and there was really no program in place to build camaraderie. Pairings seemed to be haphazard. Some stars didn’t seem thrilled to spend a week at a tournament that wouldn’t immediately make them richer.

(In 2019, by the way, only one American Ryder Cup player played in the French Open at Le Golf National in July: Justin Thomas. Remember that when you hear somebody wondering why Thomas was a captain’s pick this year.)

Commitment is less of an issue now. The U.S. team went to Italy a few weeks ago. Players see making the Ryder Cup team as a sign they have achieved a certain status in the game. The Americans want this. But it’s still going to be hard to actually do it.