I've seen the future and the Tiger Rors

Quick pop test for the class. How many majors has Seve Ballesteros won? How about Nick Faldo? And what about the king himself Arnold Palmer? The answers of course are 5, 6 and 7. Now I presume all the well educated sports fans who read the Kingbet blog got that right. So now consider how many majors you think Rory McIlroy will win. I'd heard 20 bandied about and that if he didn't equal Tiger Woods he would be a failure. Hang on a minute if he didn't double the amount of majors Arnold Palmer won he'd be a failure? When did the bar get so high and who set it?

Rory McIlroy is the most talented player on the circuit right now. Of that there is little doubt but does that mean he'll win every single event he plays? When McIlroy plays to his potential he's virtually playing a different sport. However this is only his third tournament win. Jason Day is only 23. What about Matteo Manassero, Rickie Fowler or Ryo Ishikawa? They can all play too and are as young. So let us not be so hasty as to rule out every other golfer.

In the midst of success we all get excited but let's just take a step back. One of the US pundits put it perfectly when he said we've become "Tigerfied". We expect all our golfers to be the next Tiger. Rory McIlroy is not the next Tiger, just as Sebestian Vettel is not the next Michael Schumacher. Rory McIlroy is the next Rory McIlroy. Any talented golfer can win one major, step forward Ben Curtis and Graham McDowell. The very elite among them can win multiple times see one P. Harrington. To win 7 or 8 is elite in the extreme. To win 18 simply astonishing. Now I'm not saying I don't want Rory to win 18 times. I hope he does but I don't think he will and I don't think we can class him a failure just because he doesn't catch the mighty Tiger.

Galway Tent to Terminal Two

Galway race week, July 2009, and 22 year old Stephen Gray eagerly rings trainer Pat Flynn for a ride. A horse in a flat handicap with top weight. He had won the week before and now carried a penalty. Gray cleverly thought Flynn might be interested in using a claimer to take some of the weight off. He wasn’t.

Flynn told him he could ride Bahrain Storm though. A horse with plenty of ability in the hugely competitive and prestigious Galway Hurdle. Gray’s hunger in trawling through the entries of a flat handicap had led to him picking up a nice ride over the sticks in the most valuable race of the week.

‘He didn’t take much riding.’ ‘Pat told me to go down the rail, but he was a bit squeezed and didn’t enjoy it so I moved him off.’ Already contradicting himself, an instinctive, ballsy move, ignoring instruction to get the horse travelling more sweetly. The race panned out well from there. Bahrain Storm jumped fluently and eased into contention as the business end loomed. The blinkered runner struck the front with Stephen as they rounded the final corner at the bottom of the hill. ‘The winning post seemed to be going further and further away.’ Bahrain Storm (20/1) won by 6 lengths from the fancied favourite Deutschland with Ruby Walsh aboard.

It was the Dundalk conditional’s biggest ever win by a long way. He remembers everything of the race but ‘the interviews and all that were a blur’. AttheRaces, TG4, RTE, various radio stations and most of the print media kept him for over an hour. ‘On the way home it started to sink in.’ ‘I went home to Limerick but all my flatmates and my girlfriend Maria were egging me on to go back to Galway.’ Laughing he reminisces, ‘we went out for a while’.

 

Twenty months later Stephen and his still girlfriend Maria like so many others on this island are emigrating to Australia. Stephen is not quick to blame anyone. None of the old reliables cross his lips; the government, the banks or the recession. Simply, ‘it’s very hard’. ‘Even Ruby is now riding bad horses in bad handicaps to make up for the one’s he’s missing.’ He points out ‘there’ll be only 3 jump races on a card in the summer’, ‘less horses’, ‘and you’ll have Ruby, Barry, Andrew Mc, Paul Carberry  and the likes riding the best horses’. Stephen is not bitter but simply bemoans the lack of opportunity realistically facing him this summer. He admits though ‘if you’re not riding winners you are not riding with a lot of confidence’. His last winner was last year, in Australia! It’s been a tough barren spell. ‘I’ve been working since I was 14 here, it’ll be a change anyway.’ ‘If I go out there, hopefully ride a few winners, and get my confidence back.’

New Balls Please – No Thanks

The true start of the summer arrived this week, with Wimbledon commencing and for the first time in 27 years there was an Irish interest in the competition. Conor Niland became the first player to qualify for Wimbledon proper, in my lifetime.

During my youth, Wimbledon was always the sporting highlight of the summer, in non World Cup years. The entire street would take out our rackets and play tennis on the road. This enthusiasm for the game normally faded out less than a week after the competition ended, as youngsters failed to emulate the serve of Sampras or the returns of Agassi. There were however always some Borris Becker dives for the ball, which often lead to tears.

Unfortunately Conor Niland did not win his first round match against Mannarino, however the five set match held much drama for the spectators.

In recent years, I have only watched the final in full,  following the rest of the competition through the news or through highlights programmes.

However something struck me during the Niland – Mannarino game, Wimbledon has not really changed since the time of my youth. There are still no gaudy advertisements to be found, the pictures from the lesser courts still come from undesirable angles, the players still wear conservative outfits (due to the rule that all players must wear white and that men must wear sleeves), in fact all that seems to have changed is that centre court now has a roof.

Sick as a Dog: The slow death of Greyhound Racing

Two weeks ago the Wall Street Journal produced some sobering facts, at least from the perspective of greyhound owners. The sport, which was once the best-attended in Britain, now boasted fewer than two million patrons a year. This was in stark contrast to its heyday in the 1940s, when fifty million people a year went to the dogs. In America, where it was synonymous with blue-collar life, greyhound racing has now become part of Rust Belt. Ten years ago, there were fifty tracks in fifteen states, now there are only twenty-five, concentrated in just seven states. Sixteen of those are in Florida, and the amount gambled on the sport has halved in the past decade. Dog owners have some cause for optimism. The sport is making inroads in China, largely because of its openness to gambling. However, in its Anglo-Saxon heartlands, greyhound racing is at best a niche sport, up there with polo and pigeon racing as being something that requires an initial financial outlay that discourages most punters. Unless one is an aficionado, there is little incentive to bet on the sport (critical voices suggest that many races are heavily rigged), and like horse racing, dog racing is all about the gambling. The sport's primary revenue generators are split between anoraks, who tend to bet small but frequently, and those who are looking for a more offbeat night out.

What accounts for the demise of dog racing? The movement towards bookmakers shops and online gambling provides one answer. A sport that, at one point, was one of the few outlets a punter had now finds itself competing in a much wider field than before. It is telling that it is in China, where there are stiff restrictions on gambling, that the sport is pinning its hopes.
Perhaps the main reason that dog racing has gone into decline is sociological. In its prime, greyhound racing was, like all sports, an intensely personal affair. The live game was what mattered, and greyhound racing could deliver on all fronts. It didn't require patrons' constant attention, allowing them a social forum, and encouraging them to partake in other activities, primarily drinking and gambling, both of which generated revenue for the tracks.

The Scottish Problem

Professional rugby has been very good to Ireland, in the past decade the standard of performance of the not just the Irish national side has improved but the success of the provincial system is also the envy of our northern hemisphere neighbours. The success Ireland has enjoyed in recent years in the 6 Nations, Heineken Cup and the Celtic League/Pro 12 has been based on strong foundations. Key players are regulated in terms of their game time, strength and conditioning standards have risen dramatically and the style of rugby have continuously evolved. The rugby success in Ireland stands in stark contrast to our Celtic neighbours in Wales and Scotland. The Scots in particular have had a torrid time with professionalism.

Scotland and Ireland are quite similar in terms of the overall rugby playing numbers in each country; neither country has a huge playing base. The difference lies in the way which each country has extracted most value from its playing base and also in the way which the transition from amateurism to professionalism was handle back in 1996. The SRU established three professional sides, one in Edinburgh, one in Glasgow and one in the Borders. However the way in which these teams were established left a lot of the grassroots rugby supporters and club members feeling disenfranchised and for this reason the teams have never enjoyed huge support levels. In Ireland the transition, whilst not seamless was handle a lot more delicately. By utilising the existing provincial sides and allocating funding in terms of financial and human capital the IRFU was able to create four competitive professional sides which, though they took a while to establish themselves, now enjoyed huge support levels. A quick look at the attendance chart below demonstrates the dramatic increase in support levels for Munster and Leinster, for instance in 2003-04 Leinster's average attendance was about 4000, in May of this year for the Magners League final in Thomond Park in Limerick Leinster brought 5000 supporters with them for an away fixture. Contrast this with the Scots and it makes for grim reading. Glasgow and Edinburgh both average less than 5000 spectators per match and these figures are, most worryingly of all, in decline. Even the two new Italian teams, Aironi and Treviso, have enjoyed better support levels.

Magical McIlroy mesmerises in Maryland (and provides alliteration lovers with a wonderful headline)

 

Sheer brilliance. The man who shot 63 on day one of last year’s Open and who had a four shot lead going into the final round of this year’s Masters, finally showed his true potential last night and completed his rout, finishing on -16, a full eight shots clear of runner-up Jason Day. From his opening tee shot that sailed just over the pin on the tenth on day one, to his penultimate putt on the 72^nd that nearly drained for birdie, everything that McIlroy did last week was near flawless. He only had one 3 putt all week. He was long and accurate off the tee and it was fairways and greens all the way. Never mind semi rough, I had a semi watching him time and time again bomb another 300 yarder straight down the middle. He only dropped four shots on his way to a record breaking tournament total of 268. Tiger won his first major at 21 in Augusta in 1997 and with McIlroy only 22, the question of whether he can follow in Tiger’s golfing footsteps will inevitably be posed by many a journalist.  

                                                       I stress golfing because Tiger is now more famous to the wider public audience because of his ‘transgressions’. It would appear that McIlroy has the promise to become the new clean cut golfing sensation that sponsors dream of. He seems like a genuinely nice guy. Not just the kind of ‘nice guy’ that we hear about whenever someone kicks the bucket. “He was a quiet man who kept to himself and never harmed anyone”; loner. “He was from a nice family”; he was the black sheep. “He was a bit of a messer who just got in with the wrong crowd but deep down he was grand”; he was in and out of prison more often than a tennis ball and was an absolute drain on society. I digress. We saw what he went through in Augusta in April and anyone who plays the game can empathise with what he was feeling on the 12^th when he tried to bury his head into the peak of his cap after 3 putting from nowhere. He knew that the tournament was slipping away and he just wanted the ground to open up and swallow him. To his immense credit he gathered himself and did a television interview afterwards in which he wasn’t feeling sorry for himself and stressed that he needed to learn from this experience. Clearly they weren’t just empty words and once he put himself in a position to win this week he never looked back.

The Story So Far: US Open Golf

It turns out that the most ‘open’ US Open has been more clear-cut than we thought, with Rory McIlroy destroying the tough Congressional course.  With such record scores we have to start to make more and more comparisons with him and Tiger Woods. Tiger was 25 years old when he had the biggest winning margin (15 shots) in US Open history at Pebble Beach, now Rory sits 8 shots clear at the age of only 22. Can Rory Hold on??

A lot of questions are getting thrown about. Has he moved on from the Masters? Will he be able to bounce back and refocus if he has a bad spell of holes? How much will he win by?

The downfall of Rory McIlroy at Augusta was put down to lack of confidence in his putting, which he addressed before this tournament. Rory has had a few pointers from Dave Stockton, (a two-time Major Champion turned putting Coach) who has tweaked his putting stroke, making it a lot smoother and has been commented on by Sky Sports commentators as having a much better roll off the putter. I’m sure nobody could face watching a repeat of Augusta, so let’s hope some things ‘can’ be that simple. McIlroy has also said in past interviews that another change he has tried to make is that he needed to be a little more arrogant on the golf course, saying “I just try and have a bit of an attitude, you know?”, and you can definitely see it this week as he swaggers around before and during his rounds.  I can’t see him letting this lead slip, he is determined, knows he deserves it and has prepared too well.